Get Top Full Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, History & Culture

A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/306154 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/306154] to listen full audiobooks. Title: A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea Author: Masaji Ishikawa Narrator: Brian Nishii Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 0 minutes Release date: January 1, 2018 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.35 of Total 23 Ratings of Narrator: 4.44 of Total 9 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A New York Times bestseller and Amazon Charts Most Read and Most Sold book. A Goodreads Choice Award nominee for Memoir & Autobiography. The harrowing true story of one man’s life in—and subsequent escape from—North Korea, one of the world’s most brutal totalitarian regimes. Half-Korean, half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa has spent his whole life feeling like a man without a country. This feeling only deepened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea when Ishikawa was just thirteen years old, and unwittingly became members of the lowest social caste. His father, himself a Korean national, was lured to the new Communist country by promises of abundant work, education for his children, and a higher station in society. But the reality of their new life was far from utopian. In this memoir translated from the original Japanese, Ishikawa candidly recounts his tumultuous upbringing and the brutal thirty-six years he spent living under a crushing totalitarian regime, as well as the challenges he faced repatriating to Japan after barely escaping North Korea with his life. A River in Darkness is not only a shocking portrait of life inside the country but a testament to the dignity—and indomitable nature—of the human spirit.

A Small Town Love Story: Colonial Beach, Virginia by Sherryl Woods

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/307195 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/307195] to listen full audiobooks. Title: A Small Town Love Story: Colonial Beach, Virginia Author: Sherryl Woods Narrator: Christina Traister Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 25 minutes Release date: November 14, 2017 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Part memoir, part oral history, #1 New York Times bestselling author Sherryl Woods gives us a rare and intimate look at Colonial Beach, Virginia.  Rich in narrative history and local color, A Small Town Love Story: Colonial Beach, Virginia is an homage to the town of Sherryl Woods's summers, a place that stole her heart long ago and provided the basis for the many fictional small towns in her bestselling novels.  True to Woods's signature style of focusing on characters who are at the center of their communities, here she has woven together the stories of the very real people who helped shape this seaside Virginia town. She takes us back to the days of her own family gatherings, artfully capturing the unique essence of Colonial Beach and making us yearn for small-town life.  Woods's own memories frame the true stories she features—from the unique history of Colonial Beach itself to some firsthand accounts of the Oyster Wars that once consumed the community, to the stories of neighborhood merchants who made it a point to know just about every customer by name. From farmers to restauranteurs and hoteliers, from pastors to librarians and military folk, Woods's research and interviews give life to the personalities of a very special place.

Breaking Free: How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult, and my Father, Warren Jeffs by Rachel Jeffs

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/307180 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/307180] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Breaking Free: How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult, and my Father, Warren Jeffs Author: Rachel Jeffs Narrator: Rachel Jeffs Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 4 minutes Release date: November 14, 2017 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.57 of Total 30 Ratings of Narrator: 4.14 of Total 7 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: In this searing memoir of survival in the spirit of Stolen Innocence, the daughter of Warren Jeffs, the self-proclaimed Prophet of the FLDS Church, takes you deep inside the secretive polygamist Mormon fundamentalist cult run by her family and how she escaped it. Born into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Rachel Jeffs was raised in a strict patriarchal culture defined by subordinate sister wives and men they must obey. No one in this radical splinter sect of the Mormon Church was more powerful or terrifying than its leader Warren Jeffs—Rachel’s father. Living outside mainstream Mormonism and federal law, Jeffs arranged marriages between under-age girls and middle-aged and elderly members of his congregation. In 2006, he gained international notoriety when the FBI placed him on its Ten Most Wanted List. Though he is serving a life sentence for child sexual assault, Jeffs’ iron grip on the church remains firm, and his edicts to his followers increasingly restrictive and bizarre. In Breaking Free, Rachel blows the lid off this taciturn community made famous by John Krakauer’s bestselling Under the Banner of Heaven to offer a harrowing look at her life with Warren Jeffs, and the years of physical and emotional abuse she suffered. Sexually assaulted, compelled into an arranged polygamous marriage, locked away in ''houses of hiding'' as punishment for perceived transgressions, and physically separated from her children, Rachel, Jeffs’ first plural daughter by his second of more than fifty wives, eventually found the courage to leave the church in 2015. But Breaking Free is not only her story—Rachel’s experiences illuminate those of her family and the countless others who remain trapped in the strange world she left behind. A shocking and mesmerizing memoir of faith, abuse, courage, and freedom, Breaking Free is an expose of religious extremism and a beacon of hope for anyone trying to overcome personal obstacles. A Family Tree PDF accopmanies the audiobook.

Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror by Victor Sebestyen

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/306073 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/306073] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror Author: Victor Sebestyen Narrator: Jonathan Aris Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 20 hours 3 minutes Release date: November 7, 2017 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.38 of Total 8 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Victor Sebestyen's riveting biography of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin—the first major biography in English in nearly two decades—is not only a political examination of one of the most important historical figures of the twentieth century but also a fascinating portrait of Lenin the man. Brought up in comfort and with a passion for hunting and fishing, chess, and the English classics, Lenin was radicalized after the execution of his brother in 1887. Sebestyen traces the story from Lenin's early years to his long exile in Europe and return to Petrograd in 1917 to lead the first Communist revolution in history. Uniquely, Sebestyen has discovered that throughout Lenin's life his closest relationships were with his mother, his sisters, his wife, and his mistress. The long-suppressed story told here of the love triangle that Lenin had with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his beautiful, married mistress and comrade, Inessa Armand, reveals a more complicated character than that of the coldly one-dimensional leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. With Lenin's personal papers and those of other leading political figures now available, Sebestyen gives is new details that bring to life the dramatic and gripping story of how Lenin seized power in a coup and ran his revolutionary state. The product of a violent, tyrannical, and corrupt Russia, he chillingly authorized the deaths of thousands of people and created a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents was justified for a greater ideal. An old comrade what had once admired him said that Lenin 'desired the good . . . but created evil.' This included his invention of Stalin, who would take Lenin's system of the gulag and the secret police to horrifying new heights. In Lenin, Victor Sebestyen has written a brilliant portrait of this dictator as a complex and ruthless figure, and he also brings to light important new revelations about the Russian Revolution, a pivotal point in modern history. (With 16 pages of black-and-white photographs)

Well: Healing Our Beautiful, Broken World from a Hospital in West Africa by Sarah Thebarge

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/307669 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/307669] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Well: Healing Our Beautiful, Broken World from a Hospital in West Africa Author: Sarah Thebarge Narrator: Sarah Thebarge Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 0 minutes Release date: November 7, 2017 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Sarah The barge ponders the intersection of faith and medicine in this insightful narrative of her medical mission trip to Togo, West Africa. Sarah The barge, a Yale-trained physician assistant, nearly died of breast cancer at age twenty-seven, but that did not end her deeply felt spiritual calling to medical missions in Africa. Risking her own health, she moved to Togo, West Africa-ranked by the United Nations as the least happy country in the world-to care for sick and suffering patients. Serving without pay in a mission hospital, she pondered the intersection of faith and medicine in her quest to help make the world 'well.' In the hospital wards, she witnessed death over and over again. In the outpatient clinic, she daily diagnosed patients with deadly diseases, many of which had simple but unavailable cures. She lived in austere conditions and nearly succumbed herself in a harrowing bout with malaria. She describes her experiences in gripping detail and reflects courageously about difficult and deep human connections-across race, culture, material circumstances, and medical access. Her experience exemplifies the triumph of surviving in order to share the stories that often go untold. In the end, Well is an invitation to ask what happens when, instead of asking why God allows suffering to happen in the world, we ask, 'Why do we?'