Social Science audiobooks

The Indian Card

By: Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz

Narrated by: Amy Hall

Length: 7 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

A groundbreaking and deeply personal exploration of Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American in the United States

“Candid, unflinching . . . Her thorough excavation of the painful history that gave rise to rigid enrollment policies is a courageous gift to our understanding of contemporary Native life.” —The Whiting Foundation... Read more

Barracoon

By: Zora Neale Hurston

Narrated by: Robin Miles

Length: 3 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

A major literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God that brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last ""Black Cargo"" ship to arrive in... Read more

The Undocumented Americans

By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Length: 4 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation.

“Karla’s book sheds light on people’s personal experiences and allows their stories to be told and their voices to be... Read more

Black AF History

By: Michael Harriot

Narrated by: Michael Harriot

Length: 15 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans.America’s backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It is the story of the pilgrims on... Read more

Unlearning Shame

By: Devon Price, PhD

Narrated by: Devon Price, PhD

Length: 9 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Learn to identify—and combat—Systemic Shame, the feeling of self-hatred and disempowerment that comes from living in a society that blames individuals for systemic problems, with this invaluable resource from the social psychologist and author of Unmasking Autism.

Systemic Shame is the socially engineered self-loathing that says we are solely to... Read more

Bitch

By: Lucy Cooke

Narrated by: Lucy Cooke

Length: 11 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

A fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom  Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser.  Since Charles... Read more

Butts

By: Heather Radke

Narrated by: Emily Tremaine

Length: 8 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

“Winning, cheeky, and illuminating….What appears initially as a folly with a look-at-this cover and title becomes, thanks to Radke’s intelligence and curiosity, something much meatier, entertaining, and wise.” —The Washington Post

“Lively and thorough, Butts is the best kind of nonfiction.” —Esquire, Best Books of 2022

A “carefully researched... Read more

Conspirituality

By: Derek Beres, Matthew Remski & Julian Walker

Narrated by: Matthew Remski

Length: 13 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Conspirituality takes a deep dive into the troubling phenomenon of influencers who have curdled New Age spirituality and wellness with the politics of paranoia—peddling vaccine misinformation, tales of child trafficking, and wild conspiracy theories.
 
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a disturbing social media trend emerged: a large... Read more

Dopesick

By: Beth Macy

Narrated by: Beth Macy

Length: 10 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

A Hulu limited series inspired by the New York Times bestselling book by Beth Macy.

Journalist Beth Macy's definitive account of America's opioid epidemic "masterfully interlaces stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference" (New York Times) -- from the boardroom to the courtroom and into the... Read more

The Righteous Mind

By: Jonathan Haidt

Narrated by: Jonathan Haidt

Length: 11 hours

Abridged: No

Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.

His starting point is moral... Read more

Frostbite

By: Nicola Twilley

Narrated by: Nicola Twilley

Length: 12 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

"Engrossing...hard to put down." — The New York Times Book Review

“Frostbite is a perfectly executed cold fusion of science, history, and literary verve . . . as a fellow nonfiction writer, I bow down. This is how it's done.” — Mary Roach, author of Fuzz and Stiff

An engaging and far-reaching exploration of refrigeration, tracing its evolution... Read more

We Keep the Dead Close

By: Becky Cooper

Narrated by: Becky Cooper

Length: 15 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

A Recommended Book from: New York Times * Publisher's Weekly * Kirkus * BookRiot * Booklist * Boston Globe * Goodreads * Town & Country * Refinery29 * CrimeReads * Glamour

Dive into a "tour de force of investigative reporting" (Ron Chernow): a "searching, atmospheric and ultimately entrancing" (Patrick Radden Keefe) true crime narrative of an... Read more

Transgender History, second edition

By: Susan Stryker

Narrated by: Emily Cauldwell

Length: 7 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans... Read more

See No Stranger

By: Valarie Kaur

Narrated by: Valarie Kaur

Length: 13 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

#1 LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER • FINALIST FOR THE DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE • An urgent manifesto and a dramatic memoir of awakening, this is the story of revolutionary love.

“In a world stricken with fear and turmoil, Valarie Kaur shows us how to summon our deepest wisdom.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love
 
How do we love in a time... Read more

This Book Is Gay

By: Juno Dawson

Narrated by: Christopher Solimene

Length: 6 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

Lesbian. Bisexual. Queer. Transgender. Straight. Curious. This book is for everyone, regardless of gender or sexual preference. This book is for anyone who's ever dared to wonder. This book is for you.



There's a long-running joke that, after "coming out," a lesbian, gay guy, bisexual, or trans person should receive a membership card and... Read more

Evicted

By: Matthew Desmond

Narrated by: Dion Graham

Length: 11 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

One of the most acclaimed books of our time, this modern classic “has set a new standard for reporting on poverty” (Barbara Ehrenreich, The New York Times Book Review).

In... Read more

Fire Weather

By: John Vaillant

Narrated by: Alan Carlson

Length: 14 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

A stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce

“Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page…Captures the majesty and horror of one of [our] great disasters.” —David... Read more

Begin Again

By: Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Narrated by: Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Length: 7 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A powerful study of how to bear witness in a moment when America is being called to do the same.”—Time

James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. What can we learn from his struggle in our own moment?
 
One of the Best Books of the Year:... Read more

Why Are People Into That?

By: Tina Horn

Narrated by: Tina Horn

Length: 10 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

From a #1 Apple podcast host, Lambda Literary fellow, and dominatrix comes a sex-positive, judgment-free cultural deep-dive into the world of kink.
 

When celebrated BDSM educator Tina Horn first launched Why Are People Into That?!, publications from Vice to Buzzfeed heralded it as one of the best sex podcasts around. Each episode centered... Read more

Against Technoableism

By: Ashley Shew

Narrated by: Maria Pendolino

Length: 4 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

When Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume... Read more

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . .

By: David Graeber

Narrated by: Jacques Servin & Savitri D

Length: 13 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews.

"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic... Read more

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

By: Beverly Daniel Tatum

Narrated by: Beverly Daniel Tatum

Length: 13 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

The classic, New York Times-bestselling book on the psychology of racism that shows us how to talk about race in America.

Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? How can we get past our reluctance to... Read more

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

By: Paulo Freire

Narrated by: Dennis Kleinman

Length: 7 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire's work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and... Read more

The T in LGBT

By: Jamie Raines

Narrated by: Jamie Raines & Shaaba Lotun

Length: 5 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Brought to you by Penguin.

Hey, I'm Jamie, a 29-year-old trans guy from the UK. I've been transitioning for 12 years now after realising I was trans (by accident!) at sixteen years old. I knew I was a boy since the age of four, but realised whilst growing up that I was different. It was only in my teens that I found the words to express who I was... Read more