Listen to New Full Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Women

Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir by Linda Ronstadt

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/359814 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/359814] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir Author: Linda Ronstadt Narrator: Kathe Mazur Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 13 minutes Release date: December 15, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.33 of Total 9 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: In this memoir, iconic singer Linda Ronstadt weaves together a captivating story of her origins in Tucson, Arizona, and her rise to stardom in the Southern California music scene of the 1960s and ‘70s. Tracing the timeline of her remarkable life, Linda Ronstadt, whose forty-five year career has encompassed a wide array of musical styles, weaves together a captivating story of her origins in Tucson, Arizona, and her rise to stardom in the Southern California music scene of the 1960s and ‘70s. Linda Ronstadt was born into a musical family, and her childhood was filled with everything from Gilbert and Sullivan to Mexican folk music to jazz and opera. Her artistic curiosity blossomed early, and she and her siblings began performing their own music for anyone who would listen. Now, in this beautifully crafted memoir, Ronstadt tells the story of her wide-ranging and utterly unique musical journey. Ronstadt arrived in Los Angeles just as the folkrock movement was beginning to bloom, setting the stage for the development of country-rock. As part of the coterie of like-minded artists who played at the famed Troubadour club in West Hollywood, she helped define the musical style that dominated American music in the 1970s. One of her early backup bands went on to become the Eagles, and Linda went on to become the most successful female artist of the decade. In Simple Dreams, Ronstadt reveals the eclectic and fascinating journey that led to her long-lasting success, including stories behind many of her beloved songs. And she describes it all in a voice as beautiful as the one that sang “Heart Like a Wheel”—longing, graceful, and authentic.

The Mary Ball Washington: The Untold Story of George Washington's Mother by Craig Shirley

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/368624 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/368624] to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Mary Ball Washington: The Untold Story of George Washington's Mother Author: Craig Shirley Narrator: Kirsten Potter Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 59 minutes Release date: December 3, 2019 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: The Mother of the Father of our Country. Mary Ball Washington was an unlikely candidate to be the mother of history’s most famous revolutionary. In fact, George Washington’s first fight for independence was from his controlling, singular mother. Stubborn, aristocratic Mary Ball Washington was entrenched in the Old World ways of her ancestors, dismissing the American experiment even as her son led the successful rebellion against the crown. During his youth, ambitious George dove into the hard-scrabble work of a surveyor and rose through the ranks of the fledgling colonial army, even as his overprotective mother tried to discourage these efforts. Mary’s influence on George was twofold. Though she raised her eldest son to become one of the world’s greatest leaders, Mary also tried many times to hold him back. While she passed down her strength and individuality to George, she also sought to protect him from the risks he needed to take to become a daring general and president. But it was this resistance itself which fanned the spark of George’s independence into a flame. The constant tug of war between the two throughout the early years helped define George’s character. In Mary Ball Washington, New York Times bestselling author Craig Shirley uncovers startling details about the inner workings of the Washington family. He vividly brings to life a resilient widow who singlehandedly raised six children and ran a large farm at a time when most women’s duties were relegated to household matters. Throughout, Shirley compares and contrasts mother and son, illuminating the qualities they shared and the differences that divided them. A significant contribution to American history, Mary Ball Washington is the definitive take on the relationship between George and Mary Washington, offering fresh insight into this extraordinary figure who would shape our nation—and the woman who shaped him.  Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Roaring Girls: The forgotten feminists of British history by Holly Kyte

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/358562 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/358562] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Roaring Girls: The forgotten feminists of British history Author: Holly Kyte Narrator: Helen Keeley Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 14 hours 2 minutes Release date: November 28, 2019 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: ‘Extraordinary’ Woman&Home A Roaring Girl was loud when she should be quiet, disruptive when she should be submissive, sexual when she should be pure, ‘masculine’ when she should be ‘feminine’. Meet the unsung heroines of British history who refused to play by the rules. Roaring Girls tells the game-changing life stories of eight formidable women whose grit, determination and radical unconventionality saw them defy the odds to forge their own paths. From the notorious cross-dressing thief Mary Frith in the seventeenth century to rebel slave Mary Prince and adventurer, industrialist and LGBT trailblazer Anne Lister in the nineteenth, these diverse characters redefined what a woman could be and what she could do in pre-twentieth-century Britain. Bold, inspiring and powerfully written, Roaring Girls tells the electrifying histories of women who, despite every effort to suppress them, dared to be extraordinary.

Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir by Deirdre Bair

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/370666 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/370666] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir Author: Deirdre Bair Narrator: Suzanne Toren Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 50 minutes Release date: November 12, 2019 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.25 of Total 4 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art. In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and a recently minted Ph.D. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could be his biographer despite her never having written a biography before. The next seven years of probing conversations, intercontinental research, singular encounters with Beckett's friends, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Bair to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir.      Where Beckett had been retiring and elusive, Beauvoir was domineering and all encompassing. Plus, there was a catch: Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other--and lived in the same neighborhood. Bair, who resorted to dodging one subject or the other by hiding out in the great cafés of Paris, learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the forceful and difficult Beauvoir required a radical change in approach and yielded another groundbreaking literary profile while also awakening Bair to an era of burgeoning feminist consciousness.      Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives gives us an entirely new perspective on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers. It is also a warmly personal reflection on the writing life--its compromises, its joys, and its rewards.

Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge by Sheila Weller

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/368092 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/368092] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge Author: Sheila Weller Narrator: Saskia Maarleveld Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 20 minutes Release date: November 12, 2019 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.04 of Total 28 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 2 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: 'Narrator Saskia Maarleveld's enthusiasm makes Weller's exhaustive research as engaging as fiction.' — AudioFile Magazine A remarkably candid biography of the remarkably candid—and brilliant—Carrie Fisher In her 2008 bestseller, Girls Like Us, Sheila Weller—with heart and a profound feeling for the times—gave us a surprisingly intimate portrait of three icons: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon. Now she turns her focus to one of the most loved, brilliant, and iconoclastic women of our time: the actress, writer, daughter, and mother Carrie Fisher. Weller traces Fisher’s life from her Hollywood royalty roots to her untimely and shattering death after Christmas 2016. Her mother was the spunky and adorable Debbie Reynolds; her father, the heartthrob crooner Eddie Fisher. When Eddie ran off with Elizabeth Taylor, the scandal thrust little Carrie Frances into a bizarre spotlight, gifting her with an irony and an aplomb that would resonate throughout her life. We follow Fisher’s acting career, from her debut in Shampoo, the hit movie that defined mid-1970s Hollywood, to her seizing of the plum female role in Star Wars, which catapulted her to instant fame. We explore her long, complex relationship with Paul Simon and her relatively peaceful years with the talent agent Bryan Lourd. We witness her startling leap—on the heels of a near-fatal overdose—from actress to highly praised, bestselling author, the Dorothy Parker of her place and time. Weller sympathetically reveals the conditions that Fisher lived with: serious bipolar disorder and an inherited drug addiction. Still, despite crises and overdoses, her life’s work—as an actor, a novelist and memoirist, a script doctor, a hostess, and a friend—was prodigious and unique. As one of her best friends said, “I almost wish the expression ‘one of a kind’ didn’t exist, because it applies to Carrie in a deeper way than it applies to others.” Sourced by friends, colleagues, and witnesses to all stages of Fisher’s life, Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge is an empathic and even-handed portrayal of a woman who—as Princess Leia, but mostly as herself—was a feminist heroine, one who died at a time when we need her blazing, healing honesty more than ever.