The Biographies & Memoirs category has 8,363 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 123,952 ratings. The most-rated is Born a Crime.
The Doctors' Plague
Summary
Surgeon, scholar, best-selling author, Sherwin B. Nuland tells the strange story of Ignác Semmelweis with urgency and the insight gained from his own studies and clinical experience. Ignác Semmelweis is remembered for the now-commonplace notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients. In mid-19th century Vienna, however, this was a subversive idea. With deaths from childbed fever exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors themselves were spreading the disease. While his simple reforms worked immediately - childbed fever in Vienna all but disappeared - they brought down upon Semmelweis the wrath of the establishment, and led to his tragic end.
©2003 Sherwin B. Nuland (P)2020 Tantor
A Monster of All Time: The True Story of Danny Rolling, the Gainesville Ripper
Summary
Ambitious, attractive, and full of potential, five young college students prepared for the new semester. They dreamed of beginning careers and starting families. They had a lifetime of experiences in front of them. But death came without warning in the dark of the night. Brutally ending five promising lives, leaving behind three gruesome crime scenes, the Gainesville Ripper terrorized the University of Florida, casting an ominous shadow across a frightened college town.
What evil lurked inside him? What demons drove him to kill? What made him "A Monster of All Time"?
JT Hunter is a best-selling true crime author and attorney living in Florida.
©2018 RJ Parker Publishing (P)2018 RJ Parker Publishing
Trace Evidence
Summary
For 10 years, the California Interstate 5 highway was haunted by a dangerous serial killer. Incredibly skilled at staying ahead of the investigators as the bodies started to pile up, there wasn't enough evidence to charge the culprit with murder even once he'd been identified. Instead, they had to build a first-degree murder case in a few months while the killer was locked up on an assault conviction. Key to this was a cast of four: Vito Bertocchini, the burly ex-street cop who took the killing of a beautiful young woman personally; Kay Maulsby, the rookie homicide detective who helped unmask the killer; Ray Biondi, who fought severe budget cuts that threatened to derail the investigation; and criminalist Faye Springer, who attempted to tie the suspect to his victims through subtle but persuasive microscopic evidence. Drawing on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with these investigators, as well as other important figures such as the killer's reclusive wife, number-one New York Times best-selling author Bruce Henderson builds a fascinating portrait of this unrepentant murderer.
©1998, 2013 Bruce Henderson (P)2020 Tantor
After All...
Summary
A haunting memoir of one woman's survival of childhood abuse and neglect. After All… is an inspiring story of how faith and a grandmother's unconditional love gave young Maria the strength to survive a loveless home and, incredibly, showed her the path to forgiveness. The memoir traces her journey from poverty in rural Portugal to a full and happy life in Canada. After All… is an inspiration of perseverance, courage and forgiveness.
©2020 Maria Trautman (P)2020 Maria Trautman
Principal Suspect
Summary
Joseph Wambaugh's Echoes in the Darkness and its subsequent TV dramatization have made household words of both Susan Reinert, the murder victim, and Dr. Jay Smith, a high school principal and her accused killer. The naked body of Susan Reinert, a suburban Philadelphia school teacher, was found jammed into the hatchback of a car. Her two young children were missing and never found. Thus began one of the most prominent murder cases in Pennsylvania history, and one that would grip the nation. Now the defense attorney for the main suspect of the murders - Jay Smith, the principal of the school where Reinert taught - takes you inside the cover-ups and corruption that dramatically affected the outcome of the case. Did Jay Smith do it? Did he deserved the death penalty? It is you who must decide. Contains mature themes.
©1996, 2014 William C. Costopoulos (P)2021 Tantor
Wilhelm II.
Summary
Das Leben des letzten deutschen Kaisers. Christopher Clark folgt der Karriere des letzten deutschen Kaisers: die schwierige Jugend bei Hof, die Etablierung seiner Macht sowie seine politischen Auseinandersetzungen und Ziele. Mit dem Ersten Weltkrieg und der Niederlage des Deutschen Reichs endet auch die Herrschaft Wilhelms II. Der Kaiser dankt ab und muss den Rest seines Lebens im Exil verbringen. Clarks sorgfältig recherchierte Biografie bietet eine neue, zuweilen durchaus provokative Interpretation des kontroversen Monarchen und seiner dreißig Jahre währenden Regentschaft. >> Diese ungekürzte Hörbuch-Fassung genießt du exklusiv nur bei Audible.
©2000 / 2008 / 2020 Christopher Clark / Random House Audio / Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Übersetzung von Norbert Juraschitz (P)2008 Random House Audio; 2020 Random House Audio
Nightmare at Noon: Notorious Texas
Summary
Everything is bigger in Texas - especially crime. Two of America's best crime writers, Ron Franscell and Gregg Olsen, team up to tell the stories of a serial killer who slaughtered more people than any other psychopath of his day without ever being noticed; two of America's most shocking mass murders and how their grim echoes still linger today; and a mother so desperate for attention that she killed one of her children and repeatedly tried to suffocate the other.
©2015 Gregg Olsen & Ron Franscell (P)2015 Gregg Olsen
Priestdaddy
Summary
Padre Greg Lockwood è diverso da qualsiasi prete cattolico abbiate mai incontrato: circola per casa con i boxer, adora i film d'azione (con molta, moltissima azione), il suo frequente accanimento su una chitarra elettrica genera un rumore simile a quello di "un'intera band che muore in un incidente aereo nel 1972". Sua figlia Patricia è una poetessa non esattamente ossequiosa, che da un bel pezzo ha abbandonato la retta via della Chiesa. Ma quando una crisi inaspettata la costringe a tornare insieme al marito nella canonica dove vivono i suoi genitori, questi due mondi inevitabilmente si scontrano. Patricia Lockwood non racconta solo momenti emblematici della sua infanzia e adolescenza (da una maldestrissima battuta di caccia in famiglia a una manifestazione antiabortista davanti a una clinica che si conclude con l'arresto del padre, al suo coinvolgimento in una specie di culto frequentato da un gruppo di giovani cattolici), ma anche gli otto lunghi travagliatissimi mesi che lei e suo marito hanno trascorso nella casa dei genitori dopo un decennio di vita indipendente, mesi nei quali Patricia ha cercato di educare a modo suo un seminarista che viveva con loro nella canonica, ha cercato di spiegare i riti arcani tipici del cattolicesimo al marito sconcertato e - insieme alla madre - si è imbattuta in una sostanza misteriosa su un letto d'albergo. Saltando con estrema nonchalance dal volgare al sublime, dal comico al profondo, al poetico, Priestdaddy dipinge in modo divertente e indimenticabile un'educazione religiosa molto sui generis e l'equilibrio quanto mai precario tra un'identità conquistata a duro prezzo e il peso della famiglia e della tradizione, ma finisce per essere soprattutto un ritratto dell'America di oggi, così profondamente divisa nell'intimo, così dilaniata al proprio interno, così anarchica e vitale. Un memoir pieno di poesia e di triviale bellezza che ha conquistato i lettori d'Oltreoceano.
©2020 Mondadori (P)2020 Mondadori
Sleepwalker
Summary
"I came to in the middle of it, like waking inside a horror movie, silent scream and all. Eyes wide open. I was standing at an open window, staring at the dizzying curve of Riverside Drive, five floors below. I'd stopped, somehow, poised, about to jump." Growing up the good girl in an Irish American family full of drinkers and terrible sleepers, Kathleen Frazier was 12 when her seemingly innocent sleepwalking turned dangerous. Over the next few years, she was a popular A+ student by day, the star of her high school musical. At night she both longed for and dreaded sleep. Frazier moved to Manhattan in the 1980s, hoping for a life in the theater but getting a run of sleepwalking performances instead. Efforts to abate her malady with drinking failed miserably. She became promiscuous, looking for nighttime companionship. Could a bed partner save her from flinging herself down a flight of stairs or out an open window? Exhaustion stalked her, and rest and love were seemingly out of reach. This is the journey Frazier illuminates in her intimate memoir. While highlighting her quest to beat her sleep terrors and insomnia, this is ultimately a story of health, hope, and redemption.
©2015 Kathleen Frazier (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
Old Geezer Romancing in Cyberspace
Summary
Bill McDonald, an award-winning journalist, had no intention of writing about the internet dating he began at age 69.
What could occur on the dates of an old geezer like me, he reasoned, that would pique ones interest or keep a reader spellbound?
It didn't take long for him to realize he'd failed miserably as a soothsayer.
One first-time date met him, quite intentionally, while she luxuriated in a bath of soapsuds and bubbles. A luncheon date startled him with a fact not mentioned in her profile: she was the great-granddaughter of Mark Twain, having discovered the kinship only two years earlier. A sex therapist insisted on smudging him before he could enter her home. This ancient ritual had her wafting herbal smoke around his body to eliminate negative vibes.
These and other noteworthy occurrences led the author to write the fascinating pause resister, Old Geezer Romancing in Cyberspace.
©2018 Bill McDonald (P)2019 Bill McDonald
Assignment: Oswald
Summary
From the FBI agent assigned to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the JFK assassination, comes the first authoritative, insider's account. Special Agent James Hosty began investigating Lee Harvey Oswald in October 1963, a full month before the JFK assassination. From November 22 on, Hosty watched as everyone from the Dallas Police, the FBI, the CIA, Naval Intelligence, and the State Department up through the Warren Commission to J. Edgar Hoover, Robert Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson reacted to and manipulated the facts of the president’s assassination - until Hosty himself became their scapegoat. After seeing his name appear in three inconclusive federal investigations and countless fact-twisting conspiracy theories (including Oliver Stone’s motion picture), Hosty decided to tell his own story. Assignment: Oswald is the authoritative insider’s account of one of our country’s most traumatic events. Combining his own unique, intimate knowledge of the case with previously unavailable government documents - including top secret CIA files recently released from the National Archives - Hosty tells the true story behind the assassination and the government’s response to it, including the suppression of a documented Oswald-Soviet-Castro connection. Hosty offers an exclusive insider’s knowledge of the mechanisms, the power structures, and the rivalries in and among the various intelligence and law enforcement agencies and why they have determined who knows what about the assassination. Here, at last, is an unmistakably expert and responsible account of the murder of President Kennedy.
©1996, 2011 James P. Hosty, Jr. (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
The Other Mothers
Summary
A story of fertility, feminism, and family. Jenn Berney was one of those people who knew she was destined for motherhood - it wasn't a question of if, but when. So when she and her wife, Kelly, decided to start building their family, they took the next logical step: They went to a fertility clinic. But they soon found themselves entrenched in a medical establishment that didn't know what to do with people like them. With no man factoring into their relationship, doctors were at best embarrassed and at worst disparaging of the couple. Soon Jenn found herself stepping outside of the system determined to disregard her. Looking into the history of fertility and the LGBTQ+ community, she saw echoes of her own struggle. For decades queer people have defied the patriarchy and redefined the nuclear family - and Jenn was walking in their footsteps. Through the ups and downs of her own journey, Jenn reflects on a turbulent past that has led her to this point and a bright future worth fighting for. With clarity, determination, and hope, The Other Mothers gives us a wonderful glimpse into the many ways we can become family.
©2021 Jennifer Berney (P)2021 Tantor
Women in White Coats
Summary
For fans of Hidden Figures and Radium Girls comes the remarkable story of three Victorian women who broke down barriers in the medical field to become the first women doctors, revolutionizing the way women receive health care. In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness - a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs, or be received in polite society. Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same. Though very different in personality and circumstance, together these women built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges - creating for the first time medical care for women by women. With gripping storytelling based on extensive research and access to archival documents, Women in White Coats tells the courageous history these women made by becoming doctors, detailing the boundaries they broke of gender and science to reshape how we receive medical care today.
©2021 Olivia Campbell (P)2021 Harlequin Enterprises, Limited
Vivre
Summary
Vaincre, au plein cœur de l'hiver et sans oxygène, le Nanga Parbat, cette montagne tueuse, immense pyramide de gneiss cuirassée de glace qui culmine au Pakistan à 8 125 mètres, c'est l'exploit qu'ont réalisé le 25 janvier 2018 Élisabeth Revol et son compagnon de cordée Tomasz Mackiewicz. Mais l'euphorie de la victoire sera de courte durée. À peine au sommet, l'aventure vire au cauchemar : Tomek est frappé de cécité. Comment dès lors espérer survivre, réchapper de cette "zone de la mort", où l'oxygène se fait si rare que l'on peine à mettre un pied devant l'autre, où le froid et le vent sont si extrêmes que le gel menace à tout instant ? Dans ce récit captivant, Élisabeth Revol met ses propres mots sur cette tragédie et l'extraordinaire opération de sauvetage dont le monde entier s'est fait l'écho. Elle affronte ses souvenirs, sa terreur, sa douleur immense, le déchirement d'avoir survécu, seule, en un hommage poignant à son ami Tomek.
©2019 Flammarion. Crédits pour les prononciations en polonais : Alex Michalowski (P)2021 Audible Studios
Four Seconds: A Memoir
Summary
“I’m not going to try it,” I said. “You’ll like it,” she argued. “I know I’ll like it,” I said. “That’s why I’m not going to try it.” “Try it just this once and I’ll never ask you to do it again.” That was a deal. I slipped back into the driver’s seat while Pam corn-rowed two neat lines of the silky white powder on the back of a plastic cassette tape cover. Fifteen hundred dollars every month, an abusive boyfriend, a molested child, a lost family, hotels for houses, a ruined leg, a gun to my head, a knife to my butt, and a jail cell all my own. Black eyes, bruised days, broken hours. Looking back, it seems strange what I gave up to get my roommate off my back. In her debut memoir, Andrade tells of her years with cocaine and crystal methamphetamine using, then selling, until all she had left of the life she wanted was a chalk outline and a pack of cigarettes. This is the story of her use and recovery, of the people who frustrated and inspired her, of the decision to leave the drug world. It is the story of her slow, often unsteady walk home.
©2019 Laura Andrade and Jean Knight Pace (P)2020 Laura Andrade and Jean Knight Pace
Skin
Summary
A collection of critical essays from award-winning author Dorothy Allison about identity, gender politics, and queer theory, now with a new preface Lambda Award and American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award-winning author Dorothy Allison is known for her bold and insightful writing on issues of class and sexuality. In Skin, she approaches these topics through 23 impassioned essays that explore her identity - from her childhood in a poor family in South Carolina to her adult life as a lesbian in the suburbs of New York - and her sexuality. In “Gun Crazy”, Allison delves into what guns meant to the men and women around her when she was growing up. She gives insight into the importance of speaking professionally about sexuality in “Talking to Straight People” and articulates the danger women feel about revealing their personal desires, even within feminist communities, in “Public Silence, Private Terror”. Allison is fearless in her discussion of many social and political taboos. Compelling and raw, Skin is an honest and intimate work - perfect for Dorothy Allison fans and new listeners alike.
©1994 Dorothy Allison (P)2020 Audible, Inc.
Dancing with the Octopus
Summary
Bloomsbury presents Dancing with the Octopus by Debora Harding, read by Debora Harding. For listeners of Educated and The Glass Castle, a harrowing, redemptive and profoundly inspiring memoir of childhood trauma and its long reach into adulthood. One Omaha winter day in November 1978, when Debora Harding was just 14, she was abducted at knifepoint from a church parking lot. She was thrown into a van, assaulted, held for ransom and then left to die as an ice storm descended over the city. Debora survived. She identified her attacker to the police and then returned to her teenage life in a dysfunctional home where she was expected to simply move on. Denial became the family coping strategy offered by her fun-loving, conflicted father and her cruelly resentful mother. It wasn’t until decades later - when beset by the symptoms of PTSD - that Debora undertook a radical project: she met her childhood attacker face-to-face in prison and began to reconsider and re-imagine his complex story. This was a quest for the truth that would threaten the lie at the heart of her family and with it the sacred bond that once saved her. Dexterously shifting between the past and present, Debora Harding untangles the incident of her kidnapping and escape from unexpected angles, offering a vivid, intimate portrait of one family’s disintegration in the 1970s Midwest. Written with dark humor and the pacing of a thriller, Dancing with the Octopus is a literary tour de force and a groundbreaking narrative of reckoning, recovery and the inexhaustible strength it takes to survive.
©2020 Debora Harding (P)2020 Hachette Audio
Bill Graham (Heroes of History)
Summary
Billy boarded the train to Minneapolis. He had come to Los Angeles months before as a small-time preacher. Now he was leaving as one of the most recognized Christians in the country. It was not what Billy had sought; he'd just been open for God to use. Billy wondered if this would be the peak of his fame or if something bigger was about to happen. The oldest son of dairy farmers from Charlotte, North Carolina, young Billy Graham attended evangelical revival meetings that inspired him for the rest of his life. As an ordained minister, he rose to prominence and would subsequently preach the Christian message to over 200 million people in 185 countries. Graham championed civil rights, befriended US politicians and presidents, and traveled the world to places no one else dared to go. His life and ministry have shaped the spiritual life of America and offers hope for the future - inspiring new generations of leaders willing to serve with courage, integrity, and vision. Graham's message continues to ring true today: There is opportunity for repentance and for a great light to shine - the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Heroes of History is a unique biography series that brings the shaping of history to life with the remarkable true stories of fascinating men and women who changed the course of history. The stories of Heroes of History are told in an engaging narrative format, where related history, geography, government, and science topics come to life and make a lasting impression. This is a premier biography line for the entire family.
©2015 YWAM Publishing (P)2015 YWAM Publishing
Notes and Sketches of New South Wales During a Residence in That Colony from 1839 to 1844
Summary
In the summer of 1839, 26-year-old Louisa Anne Meredith, in the company of her husband, Charles Meredith, sailed from England to the British colony of New South Wales, in what was then New Holland. Four years later, she published a detailed account of the years since she had left England. A fascinating window into the past, Louisa's impressions and experiences cover the four-month ocean voyage; life within the fledgling city of Sydney; travels across the Blue Mountains to Bathurst; and eventual settlement at Homebush in Sydney's west. Vivid observations of Sydney as it was in the 1840s combine with descriptions of flora, fauna, and the general way of life in the colony, all told through the eyes of a well-educated, articulate, and well-to-do woman who had come from a very different climate and upbringing to that she found in Australia. Louisa was a naturalist, author, and illustrator and her eye for detail provides a historically significant document giving a unique window into early Australian settlement. From descriptions of polite society, to hardships of drought and overland travel; from architecture to politics, convicts to aboriginal customs, Louisa's keen wit and clever insight provide a fascinating account of life in colonial Australia.
©2021 Louisa Anne Meredith (P)2021 Amy Soakes
A Cocoon with a View
Summary
Back in the last weeks of February, which now feels like a hundred years ago, we here in Innishannon were busy planning what was termed ‘The Big Rake Off’ of the dead grass on the long sloping bank beside the road coming into the village. Happily unaware of forthcoming events, we were totally focused on creating our wild flower bank - to get something like this going you need a ‘metheal’, a word which prior to the coronavirus was unknown to anyone under 40. Then everything changed.... Exploring the themes of community, family and personal wellbeing, Alice Taylor examines a world changed utterly by the arrival of a once-in-a-century infectious disease. Heart-warming, reflective yet always practical, Alice is a wonderful guide in a world unlike the one we lived in only a few short months ago.
©2020 Alice Taylor (P)2020 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd