While audiobook memoirs may gain potency when read by their authors, there are times when I’ve thought, Maybe they should have gotten a professional involved. But Jonathan Rosen’s slightly hoarse voice, with its New York Jewish accent, is so appealing and apropos, his reading of complicated and difficult material so careful and clear, it makes the listener’s experience of his personality and his investment in the story even stronger. Rosen earned a starred Kirkus review for The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions (Penguin Random House Audio, 16 hours and 43 minutes), his account of his relationship with boyhood friend Michael Lauder, opening with vivid scenes of their New Rochelle, New York, school days and their years at Yale. Though the friendship always had a competitive streak, it was a hare-and-tortoise situation: Lauder was the acknowledged supergenius, Rosen the dazzled sidekick. As the course of events and changes in Lauder’s personality begin to drive them apart, Rosen enriches the memoir with interviews and research, putting the personal story in a finely developed political, historical, and cultural context, while keeping the emotional tension high with his candor, vulnerability, and considered self-implication.

Similar topic, different regional accent, same verdict on the narration: Meg Kissinger’s flat Chicagoland vowels, her judicious sprinkling of all-American idioms (“Shut up!” to express disbelief, “freakin’” when nothing else will do), and the tenderness, anger, and disbelief that can be heard in her voice all enrich While You Were Out: An Intimate Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence (Macmillan Audio, 11 hours and 8 minutes). Born in 1957, Kissinger was the fourth of eight siblings, two of whom died by suicide. Or as she puts it with characteristic straightforwardness: “Take two alcoholics—one with bipolar disorder and the other with crippling anxiety—and let them have eight kids in twelve years. What could possibly go wrong?” Plenty, of course, but while she doesn’t hold back on the hard parts—her father’s violent rages, her mother’s unexplained disappearances, eventually revealed to be institutionalizations—she also vividly evokes the love, high spirits, and humor that underlie the relatively happy childhood she managed to have nonetheless. Like Rosen, she gives an account of the last half-century of mental health legislation, making what our reviewer calls “an impassioned argument for reform in caring for the afflicted.”

As for calling in the professionals: While author Michael Finkel reads the fascinating afterword, where he explains how he reported The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession (Penguin Random House Audio, 5 hours and 39 minutes), there’s no better choice for the main narration than actor Edoardo Ballerini, whose elegant vocal style fits the topic perfectly. As our reviewer points out, “Finkel’s play-by-play of each theft has the pacing and atmosphere of a good suspense tale,” and his depiction of the personalities of Stéphane Breitwieser and his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, effectively enlists the reader’s sympathies as they pull off their obsessive-compulsive capers. Between 1994 and 2001, with Anne-Catherine acting as lookout or providing distraction, Breitwieser “liberated” over 300 pieces of art valued at close to $2 billion. His motivation for the heists was not financial; rather than sell a single statue or painting, he kept the whole stash in his attic apartment in his mother’s house. From the descriptions of the couple’s secondhand couture outfits to the exact manipulations of the Swiss Army knife that freed the works from their displays, the detail Finkel provides is fascinating. (The printed book contains maps and reproductions of the stolen art; one wishes for a PDF with the audio version.)

Marion Winik hosts the NPR podcast The Weekly Reader.