Biography & Memoir audiobooks

West with the Night

By: Beryl Markham

Narrated by: Anna Fields

Length: 8 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

This beautifully written autobiography brings us the remarkable life story of Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Brought up on a farm in Kenya, Markham chose to stay in Africa when, at seventeen, her father lost their farm and went to Peru. She began an apprenticeship as a racehorse trainer which... Read more

Brother Ray

By: Ray Charles & David Ritz

Narrated by: Andrew L. Barnes

Length: 13 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

Ray Charles (1930–2004) led one of the most extraordinary lives of any popular musician. In Brother Ray, he reveals his life story unsparingly, from the chronicle of his musical development to his heroin addiction to his tangled romantic life.Overcoming poverty, blindness, the loss of his parents, and the pervasive racism of the era, Ray Charles... Read more

Kafka in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 2 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

A handsome recluse, plagued by indecision and hypochondria, Kafka nonetheless exhibited an extraordinary strength. He developed the uncanny ability to observe himself with cool objectivity, and he cultivated this ability in his writing, where it appeared in increasingly original metaphorical form. His works became among the greatest of the... Read more

García Márquez in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 2 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

García Márquez stands on the shoulders of a great Latin American literary heritage. But he is also that modern rarity, a writer with aspirations to high art who also remains hugely popular. For those who fall under his spell, his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is one of the richest literary dreams ever written. Its “magical realism” has... Read more

Dostoevsky in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 2 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion.After narrowly avoiding a firing squad when he was just twenty-eight years... Read more

Miles Gone By

By: William F. Buckley

Narrated by: William F. Buckley

Length: 18 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

In this autobiography, woven from personal pieces composed over the course of a celebrated writing life of more than fifty years, you’ll meet William Buckley the boy, growing up in a family of ten children; Buckley the political enfant terrible, whose debut book, God and Man at Yale, was a New York Times bestseller; Buckley the editor of the... Read more

Back in Action

By: David Rozelle

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 6 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

They put a price on his head. They did everything they could to disrupt his mission. Finally, when an antitank mine tore off his right foot, the warriors of jihad in Iraq thought they had neutralized one of their most resourceful, determined foes. They were wrong.Refusing to let his injury stop him, Captain David Rozelle roared back into action,... Read more

Hope and Honor

By: General Sid Shachnow & Jann Robbins

Narrated by: Brian Emerson

Length: 16 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Major General Sid Shachnow was ten-years old when he escaped the notorious Kovno concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. Later, he traveled to post-war Germany and he earned a living as a courier for his mother’s black market business. His family eventually came to America where he struggled to get an education, held down three jobs and... Read more

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

By: John Perkins

Narrated by: Brian Emerson

Length: 9 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

This phenomenal New York Times bestseller is an exposé of international corruption and an inspired plan to turn the tide for future generations.John Perkins was an economic hit man. His job was to convince countries that are strategically important to the United States, from Indonesia to Panama, to accept enormous loans for infrastructure... Read more

The Golden Mountain

By: Irene Kai

Narrated by: Anna Fields

Length: 11 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

A journey back in time, The Golden Mountain is the gripping story of four generations of Chinese women who live and die under the restrictions of their culture—except for one, the author. Her story tells of growing up in Hong Kong and of her transition to New York City, where she struggled to meld the American dream with her ethnic background.... Read more

Kindred Souls

By: Edna P. Gurewitsch

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 10 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

For fifteen years, Eleanor Roosevelt and her handsome doctor, David Gurewitsch, were friends—traveling, entertaining, and eventually buying a townhouse together in Manhattan. Their friendship has always intrigued historians, but not much was known about it. David kept detailed journals and took thousands of photos, but he never publicly... Read more

Wolves and Honey

By: Susan Brind Morrow

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 4 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Our complex relationship to the natural world is revealed through the unusual lives and deaths of a trapper and a beekeeper.Susan Brind Morrow brings her singular sensibility as a classicist and linguist to this strikingly original reflection on the fine but resilient threads that bind humans to the natural world.Prompted by the emotional loss... Read more

Dylan Thomas

By: Andrew Lycett

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 18 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

In this authoritative, fresh, and compelling account of the extraordinary life and enduring work of Dylan Thomas—author of Under Milkwood, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Adventures in the Skin Trade, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog, and numerous poems and stories—Andrew Lycett peels back the layers of story that have accumulated around this... Read more

Divorced from the Mob

By: Andrea Giovino

Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat

Length: 9 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Andrea Giovino breaks the Mafia's code of silence and describes the life of a woman born and bred into the Family—and her inspirational escape. Her defiant struggle to break free of her family's criminal legacy is by turns horrifying and heartbreaking. As a child in Brooklyn, Giovino watched her brother become a hit man and helped her mother... Read more

Unfit for Command

By: John E. O’Neill & Jerome R. Corsi

Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach

Length: 6 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

In their book, Unfit for Command, John O’Neill and coauthor Jerome Corsi bring together the words of more than two hundred Navy veterans who served with Kerry and who feel it their duty to tell why John Kerry is unworthy of the presidency.In 1971, John O’Neill, the officer who took over John Kerry’s swift boat in Vietnam, returned home from... Read more

Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

By: Marion Meade

Narrated by: Lorna Raver

Length: 11 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

This is an exuberant group portrait of four extraordinary writers—Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Ferber—whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors captured the spirit of the 1920s.Marion Meade re-creates the aura of excitement, romance, and promise of the 1920s, when these literary heroines did what they... Read more

Let Me Go

By: Helga Schneider

Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat

Length: 4 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Helga Schneider was four when her mother suddenly abandoned her family in Berlin in 1941. When she next saw her mother, thirty years later, she learned the shocking reason why.Helga’s mother had joined the Nazi SS and had become a guard in the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where she was in charge of a “correction” unit and... Read more

Raoul Wallenberg, Revised Edition

By: Harvey Rosenfeld

Narrated by: Michael Kramer

Length: 12 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

Now an international symbol of twentieth-century humanitarianism, Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, issued countless “false” visas and other documents which were virtual life certificates that saved approximately one hundred thousand Jews from the Nazis in wartime Hungary. Then in 1945, as the war drew to a close, he disappeared after being... Read more

Socrates in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Just a century after it had begun, philosophy entered its greatest age with the appearance of Socrates, who spent so much of his time talking about philosophy on the streets of Athens that he never got around to writing anything down. His method of aggressive questioning, called dialectic, was used to cut through the palaver of his adversaries... Read more

Rothstein

By: David Pietrusza

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 13 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

The model for Meyer Wolfsheim from The Great Gatsby and Guys and Dolls' Nathan Detroit, Arnold Rothstein was an underworld genius, racketeer, rumrunner, political fixer, and criminal mastermind who, as F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, played "with the faith of fifteen million people with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe."David... Read more

Positively 4th Street

By: David Hajdu

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 12 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

This is the candid, mesmerizing, and often intimate account of how four young people—Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña—gave rise to a modern-day bohemia and created the enduring sound and style of the 1960s.Even before they became lovers in 1963, Dylan and Joan Baez were seen as the reigning king and queen of folk music.... Read more

Defying Hitler

By: Sebastian Haffner

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 8 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

When the famous German author Sebastian Haffner died at age ninety-one in 1999, a manuscript was discovered among his unpublished papers that offers a compelling eyewitness account of the rise of Hitler and Nazism. He describes the country's inflation and the political climate that contributed to Hitler's rise to power and also examines the... Read more

Into the Rising Sun

By: Patrick K. O’Donnell

Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach

Length: 9 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Patrick O’Donnell has made a career of uncovering the hidden history of World War II by tracking down and interviewing its most elite troops: the Rangers, Airborne, Marines, and First Special Service Force, forerunners to America’s Special Forces. These veterans were often the first in and the last out of every conflict, from Guadalcanal and... Read more

Flying Colors

By: Tim Lefens

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 6 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

When Tim Lefens walked into the Matheny School in New Jersey to show slides of his paintings, his one-hour visit became a life-changing experience. The students he met had severe physical challenges: only one of them could talk, none could walk, and all lacked the use of their hands. As a painter facing his own gradual loss of eyesight, Tim had... Read more