Biography & Memoir audiobooks

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher

By: Nicholas Wapshott

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 11 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

It is well known that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were close allies and kindred political spirits. During their eight overlapping years in office, the U.S. president and the U.K. prime minister worked together to promote lower taxes, deregulation, free trade, and an aggressive stance against the Soviet Union.



But according to Nicholas... Read more

Shattered Dreams

By: Irene Spencer

Narrated by: Laural Merlington

Length: 14 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Irene Spencer did as she felt God commanded in marrying her brother-in-law Verlan LeBaron, becoming his second wife. When the government raided the fundamentalist, polygamous Mormon village of Short Creek, Arizona, Irene and her family fled to Verlan's brothers' Mexican ranch. They lived in squalor and desolate conditions in the Mexican desert... Read more

Condoleezza Rice: An American Life

By: Elisabeth Bumiller

Narrated by: Kimberly Farr

Length: 14 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Condoleezza Rice has until now remained a mystery behind an elegant, cool veneer. In this stunning new biography, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller peels back the layers and presents a revelatory portrait of the first black female secretary of state and President George W. Bush’s national security adviser on September 11, 2001. The... Read more

Chasing the Dream - Abridged

By: Joe Torre

Narrated by: Joe Torre

Length: 3 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: Yes

"Maybe the good Lord was just waiting for me to put on the pinstripes."

When Joe Torre was fired as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in 1995, he thought his career in baseball was over. After more than three decades and 4,200 games as a player and manager, one thing had always eluded him--winning a World Series.  

He had all but given up his... Read more

George H. W. Bush

By: Timothy Naftali

Narrated by: Patrick Frederic

Length: 7 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

George Bush was a throwback to a different era. A patrician figure not known for his eloquence, Bush readily dismissed ideology as "the vision thing." Yet, as Timothy Naftali argues, there was no person of his generation better prepared for the challenges facing the United States as the Cold War ended. Bush wisely shepherded Soviet reformers... Read more

Marx's Das Kapital

By: Francis Wheen

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 3 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

In this brilliant book, Francis Wheen, the author of the most successful biography of Karl Marx, tells the story of Das Kapital and Marx's twenty-year struggle to complete his unfinished masterpiece. Born in a two-room flat in London's Soho amid political squabbles and personal tragedy, the first volume of Das Kapital was published in 1867 to... Read more

Around the World on Two Wheels

By: Peter Zheutlin

Narrated by: Barrett Whitener

Length: 6 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

Until 1894 there were no female sport stars, no product endorsement deals, and no young mothers with the chutzpah to circle the globe on a bicycle. Annie Kopchovsky changed all of that.



Annie was a Jewish immigrant and working mother of three living in a Boston tenement with her husband, a peddler. This was as close to the American dream as she... Read more

American Caesar

By: William Manchester

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 31 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

"[Douglas MacArthur] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime. No more baffling, exasperating soldier ever wore a uniform. Flamboyant, imperious, and apocalyptic, he carried the plumage of a... Read more

House of Abraham

By: Stephen Berry

Narrated by: Michael Prichard

Length: 10 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

For all the talk of the Civil War "pitting brother against brother," until now there has never been a single book that traces the story of one family ravaged by that conflict. And no family could better illustrate the personal toll the war took than Lincoln's own. Mary Todd Lincoln was one of fourteen siblings who were split between the... Read more

Chosen by a Horse

By: Susan Richards

Narrated by: Lorna Raver

Length: 6 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

The horse Susan Richards chose for rescue wouldn’t be corralled into her waiting trailer. Instead Lay Me Down, a former racehorse with a foal close on her heels, walked right up that ramp and into Susan’s life. This gentle creature—malnourished, plagued by pneumonia and an eye infection—had endured a rough road, but somehow her heart was still... Read more

Keep Walking

By: Larry Jones

Narrated by: Chris Fabry

Length: 7 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

In 1979, Larry Jones was ministering in Haiti, where he was approached by a young boy who hadn’t eaten all day. The child asked for a nickel to buy a roll. Recalling the wheat surplus back home in Oklahoma, Jones soon started Feed The Children, initially a wheat-exporting outreach, that grew into one of the world’s largest and most respected... Read more

The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton

By: Bay Buchanan

Narrated by: Pam Ward

Length: 7 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

The race is on, and Hillary Clinton is looking to transform herself into a candidate that middle-Americans might elect as our first woman president. Can she do it?Positioning herself for her 2008 presidential run, Hillary has put away the trappings of a liberal and wrapped herself in a cloak of moderation. The senator who had been one of the... Read more

Cross and the Switchblade

By: John Sherill & David Wilkerson

Length: 6 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

The astonishing true story of Wilkerson's outreach to New York teens trapped by drugs and gangs. Gang-fighters! Drug addicts. Teenage runaways and prostitutes! The toughest and most hopeless kids that New York's ghettos had to offer. Then a young preacher from the Pennsylvania hills arrived on their turf and began preaching a message of renewal,... Read more

The Bible

By: Karen Armstrong

Narrated by: Josephine Bailey

Length: 6 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

As the work at the heart of Christianity, the Bible is the spiritual guide for one out of every three people in the world. It is also the world's most widely distributed book—it has been translated into over 2,000 languages—and the world's best-selling book, year after year. But the Bible is a complex work with a complicated and obscure history.... Read more

The Day Donny Herbert Woke Up

By: Rich Blake

Narrated by: Kimberly Farr

Length: 6 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Donny Herbert was a hardworking Buffalo city firefighter who, in December 1995, was searching the attic of a burning house when the snow-laden roof collapsed. For six minutes he was without oxygen. A beloved husband, a father of four boys, a neighborhood fixture who was always willing to lend a helping hand, Donny fell into a vegetative state... Read more

El manana

By: Mirta Ojito

Narrated by: Mirta Ojito

Length: 10 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

En estasmemorias sobre una nina, dos culturas y la lucha por la libertad, la periodistaMirtaOjito, ganadora del Premio Pulitzer, vuelve al evento en su adolescencia que cambio su vida para siempre: el exodo en el 1980 demas de 125.000 cubanos, conocido como el puente maritimo del Mariel. Con perservancia y mucho corazon, Ojito logra localizar a... Read more

Brother, I'm Dying

By: Edwidge Danticat

Narrated by: Robin Miles

Length: 7 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

From the age of four, award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph as her "second father," when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for America. And so she was both elated and saddened when, at twelve, she joined her parents and youngest brothers in New York City. As Edwidge made a life in a new... Read more

A Life Decoded

By: J. Craig Venter

Narrated by: Dick Hill

Length: 16 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

Growing up in California, J. Craig Venter didn't appear to have much of a future. An unremarkable student, he nearly flunked out of high school. After being drafted into the army, he enlisted in the navy and went to Vietnam, where the life-and-death struggles he encountered as a medic piqued his interest in science and medicine. After pursuing... Read more

Max Planck - Abridged

By: Ernst Peter Fischer

Narrated by: Ernst Peter Fischer

Length: 1 hour 15 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Max Planck (1858 - 1947) gehört zu den Menschen, vor denen man sich verneigen sollte. Planck war groß als Physiker und sein Name ist - mindestens durch das Plancksche Quantum der Wirkung - unsterblich geworden. Sein Name wird durch die (seit 1948) nach ihm benannte Gesellschaft in alle Welt verbreitet. Er war überzeugend als Philosoph, wobei... Read more

Born Standing Up

By: Steve Martin

Narrated by: Steve Martin

Length: 4 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

The riveting, mega-bestselling, beloved and highly acclaimed memoir of a man, a vocation, and an era named one of the ten best nonfiction titles of the year by Time and Entertainment Weekly.

In the mid-seventies, Steve Martin exploded onto the comedy scene. By 1978 he was the biggest concert draw in the history of stand-up. In 1981 he quit... Read more

McIlhenny's Gold

By: Jeffrey Rothfeder

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

Length: 9 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

After the Civil War ended, Edmund McIlhenny, an ambitious and tenacious Louisiana businessman, found himself with few prospects. The South's economy in ruins and his millions of dollars in Confederacy currency worthless, he had no choice but to return with his wife, Mary, to her family home in Avery Island, a former sugar plantation destroyed by... Read more

My Lobotomy

By: Howard Dully & Charles Fleming

Narrated by: Johnny Heller

Length: 9 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

A gut-wrenching memoir by a man who was lobotomized at the age of twelve.



Assisted by journalist/novelist Charles Fleming, Howard Dully recounts a family tragedy whose Sophoclean proportions he could only sketch in his powerful 2005 broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered.



"In 1960," he writes, "I was given a transorbital, or 'ice pick' lobotomy.... Read more

One Man Great Enough

By: John C. Waugh

Narrated by: David Drummond

Length: 11 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

Lincoln is the central axis of this story about America’s seemingly unstoppable march toward war, the shattering of its political landscape, and its grappling with the moral underpinnings of a republic of the people, by the people, and for the people.Here are such key events as the Mexican-American War, the Dred Scott Case, westward expansion,... Read more

Finding Iris Chang

By: Paula Kamen

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 10 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

Iris Chang, bestselling author of The Rape of Nanking and tireless human rights activist, symbolized strength to many in the literary and social justice worlds. Her fearlessness made it all the more shocking when she committed suicide in 2004 at age thirty-six.Longtime friend and confidante Paula Kamen, author of the critically acclaimed All in... Read more