Social Science audiobooks

Locally Laid

By: Lucie B. Amundsen

Narrated by: Kate Reading

Length: 8 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

How a midwestern family with no agriculture experience went from a few backyard chickens to a full-fledged farm—and discovered why local chicks are betterWhen Lucie Amundsen had a rare night out with her husband, she never imagined what he’d tell her over dinner—that his dream was to quit his office job (with benefits!) and start a... 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

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

By: Douglas Rushkoff

Narrated by: Douglas Rushkoff

Length: 9 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Why doesn’t the explosive growth of companies like Facebook and Uber deliver more prosperity for everyone?
 
What is the systemic problem that sets the rich against the poor and the technologists against everybody else?
 
When protesters shattered the windows of a bus carrying Google employees to work, their anger may have been justifiable, but it... Read more

If the Oceans Were Ink

By: Carla Power

Narrated by: Kate Reading

Length: 12 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Hailed by the Washington Post as “mandatory reading,” and praised by Fareed Zakaria as “intelligent, compassionate, and revealing,” this powerful journey will help bridge one of the greatest divides shaping our world today.If the Oceans Were Ink is Carla Power’s eye-opening story of how she and her longtime friend Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi... Read more

Pandemic

By: Sonia Shah

Narrated by: Sonia Shah

Length: 9 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

From the author of The Fever, a wide-ranging inquiry into the origins of pandemics

Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the origin of epidemics, drawing parallels between the story of cholera--one of history's most disruptive and deadly pathogens--and the new pathogens that stalk humankind today,... Read more

American Girls

By: Nancy Jo Sales

Narrated by: Thérèse Plummer & Nancy Jo Sales

Length: 14 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

A New York Times Bestseller


Instagram. Whisper. YouTube. Kik. Ask.fm. Tinder. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media. What it is doing to an entire generation of young women is the subject of award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales’s riveting and explosive American Girls.

With extraordinary... Read more

United

By: Cory Booker

Narrated by: Cory Booker

Length: 9 hours

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • United States Senator Cory Booker makes the case that the virtues of empathy, responsibility, and action must guide our nation toward a brighter future.

Raised in northern New Jersey, Cory Booker went to Stanford University on a football scholarship, accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, then studied at... Read more

Redeeming the Great Emancipator

By: Allen C. Guelzo

Narrated by: Will Damron

Length: 3 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

The larger-than-life image Abraham Lincoln projects across the screen of American history owes much to his role as the Great Emancipator during the Civil War. Yet this noble aspect of Lincoln's identity is precisely the dimension that some historians have cast into doubt. Redeeming the Great Emancipator enumerates Lincoln's anti-slavery... Read more

One Child

By: Mei Fong

Narrated by: Janet Song

Length: 7 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

When Communist Party leaders adopted the one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birth-rates would help lift China's poorest and increase the country's global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China closes the book on the policy after more than three decades, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply... Read more

The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

By: John Perkins

Narrated by: Tom Taylorson

Length: 12 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

Shocking bestseller: the original version of this astonishing tell-all book spent seventy-three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has sold more than 1.25 million copies, and has been translated into more than thirty languages.New revelations: featuring fifteen explosive new chapters, this expanded edition of Perkins’s classic... Read more

The Highest Glass Ceiling

By: Ellen Fitzpatrick

Narrated by: Jo Anna Perrin

Length: 7 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Since Victoria Woodhull launched her symbolic bid for the presidency in 1872, dozens of women have sought the presidency over the past 150 years. Their quest began long before women won the vote and it unfolded over decades when a woman's pursuit of any higher political office was met with prejudice, mockery, and hostility. Even after women... Read more

America the Beautiful

By: Ben Carson, M.D.

Narrated by: Brandon Hirsch

Length: 7 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

What is America becoming? Or, more importantly, what can she be if we reclaim a vision for the things that made her great in the first place?In America the Beautiful, Dr. Ben Carson helps us learn from our past in order to chart a better course for our future. From his personal ascent from inner-city poverty to international medical and... Read more

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

By: Seth Holmes

Narrated by: Paul Costanzo

Length: 8 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Seth M. Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes's... Read more

Fast Food Maniac

By: Jon Hein

Narrated by: Jon Hein

Length: 5 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

The charismatic radio personality from The Howard Stern Show celebrates what we love about American fast food, covering chains both national and regional and offering an opinionated view on restaurant history, secret menu items, and even drive-thru strategy.Jon Hein is a fast food maniac, with a themed Discovery Channel show under his belt to... Read more

One Righteous Man

By: Arthur Browne

Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman

Length: 13 hours

Abridged: No

A history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department’s first black officer.
 
When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as... Read more

In a Different Key

By: John Donvan & Caren Zucker

Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith

Length: 23 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Sweeping in scope but with intimate personal stories, this is a deeply moving book about the history, science, and human drama of autism.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Code Breaker
 
“Remarkable . . . A riveting tale about how a seemingly rare childhood disorder... Read more

While the City Slept

By: Eli Sanders

Narrated by: René Ruiz

Length: 9 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

“Binged Making a Murderer? Try . . . [this] riveting portrait of a tragic, preventable crime.” —Entertainment Weekly

Finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime

Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

A Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter’s gripping account of one young man’s path to murder—and a wake-up call for mental health care in America
... Read more

The Cosmic Serpent

By: Jeremy Narby

Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin

Length: 4 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences," leads the listener through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge. In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology,... Read more

The Cassandra Sanction

By: Scott Mariani

Narrated by: Colin Mace

Length: 11 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

THE MOST SHOCKING ADVENTURE YET FROM THE #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR ‘Deadly conspiracies, bone-crunching action and a tormented hero with a heart . . . packs a real punch’ Andy McDermott A TRAGIC DEATH. A GRIEVING BROTHER. A PLOT TO DECEIVE THE ENTIRE WORLD. Ex-SAS major and kidnap... Read more

The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

By: Austin Reed

Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman

Length: 10 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

The earliest known prison memoir by an African American writer—recently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholars—sheds light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America.

In 2009, scholars at Yale University came across a startling manuscript: the memoir of Austin Reed, a free black man born in the... Read more

Lessons on the Way to Heaven

By: Michael Fechner

Narrated by: Tim Gregory

Length: 5 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Once you hear this new book, you can't go back to your old life.

Texas businessman Mike Fechner had it all. Money. Investments. Prestige.
 Until he did the unthinkable. He sold his company and poured his life’s earnings into a ministry for the poor.
 With a strong faith in God at his core, this millionaire-turned-missionary envisioned a long future... Read more

The End of Average

By: Todd Rose

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

Length: 6 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

Are you above average? Is your child an A student? Is your employee an introvert or an extrovert? Every day we are measured against the yardstick of averages, judged according to how closely we come to it or how far we deviate from it.The assumption that metrics comparing us to an average—like GPAs, personality test results, and performance... Read more

Radical

By: Maajid Nawaz

Narrated by: David Linski

Length: 10 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

An insightful account of one man’s drastic evolution from religious fervor to enlightened peace.Maajid Nawaz spent his teenage years listening to American hip-hop and learning about the radical Islamist movement spreading throughout Europe and Asia in the 1980s and ’90s. At sixteen, he was already a ranking member in Hizb ut-Tahrir, a... Read more

The Idealist

By: Justin Peters

Narrated by: Corey Brill

Length: 9 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

This smart, “riveting” (Los Angeles Times) history of the Internet free culture movement and its larger effects on society—and the life and shocking suicide of Aaron Swartz, a founding developer of Reddit and Creative Commons—written by Slate correspondent Justin Peters “captures Swartz flawlessly” (The New York Times Book Review).

Aaron Swartz... Read more