Biography & Memoir audiobooks

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

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

Kabloona

By: Gontran de Poncins

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 9 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

This extraordinary classic has been variously acclaimed as one of the great books of adventure, travel, anthropology, and spiritual awakening.In 1938 and 1939, a French nobleman spent fifteen months living among the Inuit people of the Arctic. He was at first appalled by their way of life: eating rotten raw fish, sleeping with each others'... 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confucius in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Confucius taught a moral wisdom that would become a predominant social force in China from the second century BCE until the mid-twentieth century. It would appear that his aim was to turn his pupils into good government officials, but his quaint humanistic platitudes, maxims, and quasi-enigmatic anecdotes made spiritual fodder for the next two... Read more

Hegel in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Hegel’s dialectical method produced the most grandiose metaphysical system known to man. Its most vital element was the dialectic of the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This sprung from Hegel’s aim to overcome the deficiencies of logic and ascend toward Mind as the ultimate reality. His view of history as a process of humanity’s... Read more

St. Augustine in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Augustine’s spiritual crisis and conversion to Christianity, detailed in his Confessions, ultimately led him to his major contribution to philosophy: the fusion of the two doctrines of Christianity and Neoplatonism. This not only provided Christianity with a strong intellectual backing but tied it to the Greek tradition of philosophy, which... Read more

Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 21 minutes

Abridged: No

We see our age as the greatest in human history, filled with seemingly unending originality. Yet such dynamism is not a necessary characteristic of great eras. Among the most long-lasting and stable civilizations was that of medieval Europe. There stasis was achieved, and with it a stability that permitted the development of structured thought... Read more

Schopenhauer in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Schopenhauer, the "philosopher of pessimism," makes it very plain that he regards the world and our life in it as a bad joke. But if the world is indifferent to our fate, it doesn't thwart us on purpose. The world's fa├ºade is supported by what Schopenhauer calls the universal Will—blind and without purpose. This Will brings on all our misery... Read more

Spinoza in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Spinoza’s brilliant metaphysical system was derived neither from reality nor experience. Starting from basic assumptions, with a series of geometric proofs he built a universe which was also God—one and the same thing, the classic example of pantheism. Although his system seems an oddity today, Spinoza’s conclusions are deeply in accord with... Read more

Rousseau in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 28 minutes

Abridged: No

In Rousseau we encounter a walking ego, a naked sensibility. Feeling triumphs over intellectual argument in his works, which are both deeply stirring and deeply inconsistent. Yet while his contemporaries Kant and Hume may have been superior academic philosophers, the sheer power of Rousseau’s ideas was unequaled in his time. It was he who... Read more

The House on Beartown Road

By: Elizabeth Cohen

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 7 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

In this beautiful book, Elizabeth Cohen gives us a true and moving portrait of the love and courage of a family.Elizabeth is a member of the "sandwich generation"—people caught in the middle of simultaneously caring for their children and for their aging parents. She is the mother of Ava and the daughter of Daddy, and she's responsible for both... Read more