Play Audiobook Sample
The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(0.00) - 0 listener ratings
Quick Stats About this Audiobook
Total Audiobook Chapters:
Longest Chapter Length:
Shortest Chapter Length:
Average Chapter Length:
Audiobooks by this Author:
Publisher Description
In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham chronicles one of the great underexplored lives of the twentieth century and the very archetype of the modern woman. "Don't touch that girl, she'll burn your fingers," FBI director J. Edgar Hoover once said about Doris Duke, the inheritor of James Buchanan Duke's billion-dollar tobacco fortune. During her lifetime, she would be blamed for scorching many, including her mother and various ex-lovers. She established her first foundation when she was twenty-one; cultivated friendships with the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Imelda Marcos, and Michael Jackson; flaunted interracial relationships; and adopted a thirty-two-year-old woman she believed to be the reincarnation of her deceased daughter.
Even though Duke was the subject of constant scrutiny, little beyond the tabloid accounts of her behavior has been publicly known. In 2012, when eight hundred linear feet of her personal papers were made available, Sallie Bingham set out to probe her identity. She found an alluring woman whose life was forged in the Jazz Age, who was not only an early war correspondent but also an environmentalist, a surfer, a collector of Islamic art, a savvy businesswoman who tripled her father's fortune, and a major philanthropist with wide-ranging passions from dance to historic preservation to human rights.
Download and start listening now!
“Men who inherit great wealth are respected, but women who do the same are ridiculed. In The Silver Swan, Sallie Bingham rescues Doris Duke from this gendered prison and shows us just how brave, rebellious, and creative this unique woman really was and how her generosity benefits us to this day.”
— Gloria Steinem, feminist, activist, and New York Times bestselling author
Quotes
-
“Illuminating…Bingham is a generous biographer in this exacting, measured work.”
— Publishers Weekly -
“Doris Duke did not keep journals or write letters. Nevertheless, Sallie Bingham’s imaginative persistence uncovered a twentieth-century journey of love and healing, of interracial activism for progress and justice, that will delight and inspire.”
— Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt (vols. I, II, III)
The Silver Swan Listener Reviews
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
About Sallie Bingham
Sallie Bingham (1937–2025) was an American teacher, feminist activist, philanthropist, and a prolific author of memoirs, short-story collections, novels, plays, and poetry collections. Her books include Passion & Prejudice: A Family Memoir, The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters, Red Car: Stories, and The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke. Her work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in The Atlantic, New Letters, Southwest Review, and other publications. She has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle and is the founder of the Kentucky Foundation for Women, as well as the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University. She received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
About Donna Postel
Donna Postel, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is absolutely passionate about audiobooks and has narrated close to fifty titles across multiple genres, from memoir and biography to literary fiction, romance, mystery, and suspense. She uses her innate curiosity, talent, and decades of experience on stage and in the recording studio to bring books to life. When she’s not in the studio, she can be found down at the barn cleaning up after and occasionally riding horses.