Audiobooks by Tracy Daugherty

We Shook Up the World: The Spiritual Rebellion of Muhammed Ali and George Harrison

George Harrison met Muhammad Ali in 1964, when both men were on the cusp of worldwide fame. We Shook Up the World is the story of these two larger-than-life figures at a momentous time. A unique blend of biography and cultural history, this book goes to the very heart of the zeitgeist that each man inhabited and reinvented in profound and enduring ways. In 1974, deep in the Pennsylvania woods, thirty-two-year-old Muhammad Ali was seeking renewal, training to regain his heavyweight boxing title in a fight with George Foreman, and exploring questions about his politics, his career, and his life. Meanwhile, George Harrison was thirty-one years old. With the Beatles disbanded, his marriage ending, and the loss of his mother still fresh, he traveled to India to revitalize his faith, energy, and musical spirit, seeking renewal at the Hindu holy city of Varanasi. In contemplating how these two complex figures managed to carry the cultural rebelliousness and spiritual yearning of the 1960s into a new era of cataclysmic political, economic, and social change, We Shook Up the World offers an intimate perspective on two outsize figures in the nation's and the world's cultural history, and a new understanding of their unique contributions to the consciousness of their time and ours.

Tracy Daugherty (Author), Gabriel Vaughan (Narrator)

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Dante and the Early Astronomer: Science, Adventure, and a Victorian Woman Who Opened the Heavens

Explore the evolution of astronomy from Dante to Einstein, as seen through the eyes of trailblazing Victorian astronomer Mary Acworth Evershed. In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867-1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante's Divine Comedy. Was Dante's astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? As the twentieth century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars. From the perspective of one remarkable amateur astronomer, listeners will see how ideas developed during Galileo's time evolved or were discarded in Newtonian conceptions of the cosmos and recast in Einstein's theories. The result is a book about the history of science but also a poetic meditation on literature, science, and the evolution of ideas.

Tracy Daugherty (Author), David Stifel (Narrator)

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The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

In The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty, the critically acclaimed author of Hiding Man (a New York Times Notable book) and Just One Catch, delves deep into the life of distinguished American author and journalist Joan Didion in this, the first printed biography published about her life. Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction. Some of her most notable work includes Slouching towards Bethlehem, Run River, and The Year of Magical Thinking, a National Book Award winner shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Daugherty takes listeners on a journey back through time, following a young Didion in Sacramento through to her adult life as a writer. Daugherty interviews those who know and knew her personally while maintaining a respectful distance from the reclusive literary great. The Last Love Song reads like fiction; lifelong fans and listeners learning about Didion for the first time will be enthralled with this impressive tribute. “A monumental, novelistic examination of Joan Didion’s life and career…Daugherty crafts a complex, intricately shaded portrait of a woman also known for her inner toughness and intellectual rigor. This landmark work renders a nuanced analysis of a literary life, lauds Didion’s indelible contributions to American literature and journalism (especially new journalism), and documents a ‘style [that] has become the music of our time.’”—Publishers Weekly

Tracy Daugherty (Author), Bernadette Dunne (Narrator)

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