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The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke Audiobook
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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.
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"Donna Postel does a satisfying narration of this biography of Doris Duke (1912-1993)."
— AudioFile
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About Sallie Bingham
Sallie Bingham is the author of numerous books-most notably her memoir Passion and Prejudice (Knopf, 1989), but also several novels, four story collections, three poetry collections, and several plays produced off-Broadway and regionally. She was book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle, and is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, McDowell Colony, 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.