Access Top-Rated Full Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Sports

Forward: A Memoir by Abby Wambach

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/264701 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/264701] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Forward: A Memoir Author: Abby Wambach Narrator: Abby Wambach Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 20 minutes Release date: September 13, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.32 of Total 38 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 6 Genres: Sports Publisher's Summary: ''Lucid and wrenching...Forward puts [Wambach's] achievement in context with painful and beautiful candor.'' —NPR ''Forward is the powerful story of an athlete who has inspired girls all over the world to believe in themselves.''  —Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, New York Times Bestselling author of Lean In  “This is the best memoir I’ve read by an athlete since Andre Agassi’s Open.”  —Adam Grant, Wharton professor and New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take Abby Wambach has always pushed the limits of what is possible.  Named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people of 2015, the iconic soccer player captured the nation’s heart when she led her team to its recent World Cup Championship.  Admired for her fearlessness and passion, Abby is a vocal advocate for women’s rights and equal opportunity, pushing to translate the success of her team to the real world. She has become a heavily requested speaker to a wide a range of audiences, from college students to executives at Fortune 500 companies. In Forward, Abby recounts her own decisions, wins, losses, and the pivotal moments that helped her become the world class athlete and leader she is today. Wambach’s book goes beyond the soccer field to reveal a soulful person grappling universal questions about how we can live our best lives, and become our truest selves. Written with honesty and heart, Forward is an inspiring blueprint for individual growth and a rousing call to action.

Greater Than Gold: From Olympic Heartbreak to Ultimate Redemption by David Boudia

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/267141 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/267141] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Greater Than Gold: From Olympic Heartbreak to Ultimate Redemption Author: David Boudia Narrator: Adam Verner Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 50 minutes Release date: August 2, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Sports Publisher's Summary: One of America’s most heralded young divers, David Boudia twice went for Olympic gold, training obsessively and whole-heartedly for success. In his first Olympics, he failed miserably, not winning a single medal. Four years later saw a different story: he mounted the podium twice, winning both gold and bronze. The difference? In the intervening years, he’d changed the focus of his quest from seeking glory for himself to giving glory to God. In Greater Than Gold, Boudia provides a behind-the-scenes access to the rarefied world of world-class athletics while also showing readers that when they place their hope in God, they receive what they’ve been seeking all along.

Cycling the Earth: A Life-changing Race Around the World by Sean Conway

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/268723 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/268723] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Cycling the Earth: A Life-changing Race Around the World Author: Sean Conway Narrator: Stewart Clegg Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 11 minutes Release date: July 7, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 6 Genres: Sports Publisher's Summary: Sean Conway was stuck in a life dead end of his own making when he heard about a round the world cycling race. He was immediately inspired – but it was a huge undertaking and he’d hardly been on a bike in years. Could he really cycle all the way round the world, solo and unsupported? Six months later, after completing a punishing training schedule and packing up everything he owned into boxes, Sean was in Greenwich Park on the start line of the adventure of a lifetime. Soon he was way ahead of schedule, averaging 180 miles per day, and on course to break the round the world cycling record. But then disaster struck, and Sean was forced to confront the possibility that he may not be able to complete the race... In the course of his 16,000-mile journey, Sean travelled the famous pan-American highway across the Atacama Desert, outran tornados, relied on fellow travellers to ferry water across the Australian outback, and inadvertently joined a cycle club in Mumbai. He learnt things about himself he didn’t know and rediscovered a spirit of adventure that changed everything. This is a book about an amazing and sometimes incredibly difficult journey, but it’s also a book about never giving up when there’s an opportunity to follow your dreams.

Striking Distance: Bruce Lee & the Dawn of Martial Arts in America by Charles Russo

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/267053 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/267053] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Striking Distance: Bruce Lee & the Dawn of Martial Arts in America Author: Charles Russo Narrator: Dan Woren Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 10 minutes Release date: July 1, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 4 Ratings of Narrator: 2 of Total 1 Genres: Sports Publisher's Summary: In the spring of 1959, eighteen-year-old Bruce Lee returned to San Francisco, the city of his birth, and quickly inserted himself into the West Coast’s fledgling martial arts culture. Even though Asian fighting styles were widely unknown to mainstream America, Bruce encountered a robust fight culture in a San Francisco Bay area that was populated with talented and trailblazing practitioners such as Lau Bun, Chinatown’s aging kung fu patriarch; Wally Jay, the innovative Hawaiian jujitsu master; and James Lee, the no-nonsense Oakland street fighter. Regarded by some as a brash loudmouth and by others as a dynamic visionary, Bruce spent his first few years back in America advocating a more modern approach to the martial arts and showing little regard for the damaged egos left in his wake. In the Chinese calendar, 1964 was the Year of the Green Dragon. It would be a challenging and eventful year for Bruce. He would broadcast his dissenting view before the first great international martial arts gathering and then defend it by facing down Chinatown’s young ace kung fu practitioner in a legendary behind-closed-doors, high-noon-style showdown. The Year of the Green Dragon saw the dawn of martial arts in America and the rise of an icon. Drawing on more than one hundred original interviews and an eclectic array of sources, Striking Distance is an engrossing narrative chronicling San Francisco Bay’s pioneering martial arts scene as it thrived in the early 1960s and offers an in-depth look at a widely unknown chapter of Bruce Lee’s iconic life.

House of Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge by Lenny Dykstra

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/264675 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/264675] to listen full audiobooks. Title: House of Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge Author: Lenny Dykstra Narrator: Patrick Lawlor Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 32 minutes Release date: June 28, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 13 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Sports Publisher's Summary: ''Tough, straight, upsetting, and strangely beautiful. One of the best sports autobiographies I've ever read. It comes from the heart.'' —Stephen King Eclipsing the traditional sports memoir, House of Nails, by former world champion, multimillionaire entrepreneur, and imprisoned felon Lenny Dykstra, spins a tragicomic tale of Shakespearean proportions -- a relentlessly entertaining American epic that careens between the heights and the abyss. Nicknamed ''Nails'' for his hustle and grit, Lenny approached the game of baseball -- and life -- with mythic intensity. During his decade in the majors as a center fielder for the legendary 1980s Mets and the 1990s Phillies, he was named to three All-Star teams and played in two of the most memorable World Series of the modern era. An overachiever known for his clutch hits, high on-base percentage, and aggressive defense, Lenny was later identified by his former minor-league roommate Billy Beane as the prototypical ''Moneyball'' player in Michael Lewis's bestseller. Tobacco-stained, steroid-powered, and booze-and-drug-fueled, Nails also defined a notorious era of excess in baseball. Then came a second act no novelist could plausibly conjure: After retiring, Dykstra became a celebrated business mogul and investment guru. Touted as ''one of the great ones'' by CNBC's Jim Cramer, he became ''baseball's most improbable post-career success story'' (The New Yorker), purchasing a $17.5-million mansion and traveling the world by private jet. But when the economy imploded in 2008, Lenny lost everything. Then the feds moved in: convicted of bankruptcy fraud (unjustly, he contends), Lenny served two and a half harrowing years in prison, where he was the victim of a savage beating by prison guards that knocked out his front teeth. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, channeling the bewildered fascination of many observers, declared that Lenny's outrageous rise and spectacular fall was ''the greatest story that I have ever seen in my lifetime.'' Now, for the first time, Lenny tells all about his tumultuous career, from battling through crippling pain to steroid use and drug addiction, to a life of indulgence and excess, then, an epic plunge and the long road back to redemption. Was Lenny's hard-charging, risk-it-all nature responsible for his success in baseball and business and his precipitous fall from grace? What lessons, if any, has he learned now that he has had time to think and reflect? Hilarious, unflinchingly honest, and irresistibly readable, House of Nails makes no apologies and leaves nothing left unsaid.