Social Science audiobooks

Seniors Hold on to Urban Independence Into Old Age

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 8 minutes

Abridged: No

A new community model lets seniors enjoy all of the security and social amenities of a retirement community without leaving their homes. The alternative is called "aging in place." Ray Suarez reports on how this village concept may help seniors retain their independence into their golden years. Read more

The End the Suburbs

By: Leigh Gallagher

Narrated by: Jessica Geffen

Length: 7 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

“The government in the past created one American Dream at the expense of almost all others: the dream of a house, a lawn, a picket fence, two children, and a car. But there is no single American Dream anymore.”

For nearly 70 years, the suburbs were as American as apple pie. As the middle class ballooned and single-family homes and cars became... Read more

Turn Around Bright Eyes

By: Rob Sheffield

Narrated by: Rob Sheffield

Length: 6 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

Once upon a time I was falling apart. Now I'm always falling in love.Pick up the microphone.When Rob Sheffield moved to New York City in the summer of 2001, he was a young widower trying to start a new life in a new town. Behind, in the past, was his life as a happily married rock critic, with a wife he adored, and a massive collection of mix... Read more

White Americans Feel Ceiling Effect

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 6 minutes

Abridged: No

While White Americans Feel ‘Ceiling Effect,’ Blacks and Latinos Find AspirationA new study shows that since 2006 whites have grown more pessimistic about their economic outlook while African-Americans and Latinos have grown more optimistic. Ray Suarez talks with Matt Barreto of Latino Decisions and Ellis Cose, author of The End of Anger to... Read more

Gov. Markell: Hiring More People With Disabilities

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 6 minutes

Abridged: No

A new report from the National Governor's Association says states should do more to employ the 54 million Americans living with a disability, among whom only 20 percent are currently employed or looking for a job. Judy Woodruff interviews Delaware Gov. Jack Markell about his push to boost accessibility to the labor market. Read more

The Seven Paths

By: Jim Ferrell

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Too many people today have taken the wrong path. They walk alone, seeking peace and fulfillment in isolation. Countless well-meaning self-help books preach this gospel, as the name “self-help” implies. But this approach will take us only so far. Ultimately, it is in communion with our fellow beings and the natural world that we are made whole.... Read more

The Trials of Laura Fair

By: Carole Haber

Narrated by: Pam Ward

Length: 10 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

On November 3, 1870, on a San Francisco ferry, Laura Fair shot and killed her married lover, A. P. Crittenden. Throughout her two murder trials, Fair’s lawyers, supported by expert testimony from physicians, claimed that the shooting was the result of temporary insanity caused by a severely painful menstrual cycle. The first jury disregarded... Read more

After Trayvon

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 11 minutes

Abridged: No

The killing of Trayvon Martin provoked candid reflection from President Obama on the subject of discrimination and American race relations. PBS NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown, Nathan McCall, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Bishop Harry Jackson Jr. and Michael Melton continue the conversation on life and perception for black men in the U.S. Read more

New Report Reveals Where You Live and Work Affects Your Economic Mobility

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Children of low-income families in certain communities are more likely to move up the economic ladder than others, says a new report by Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley. Jeffrey Brown talks to co-author Raj Chetty, Harvard professor of economics, for more on their portrait of American social mobility. Read more

Los Angeles Killing Fields

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Los Angeles has turned former urban battlegrounds into common grounds for communities in an effort to stomp out gun violence. What looks like a regular block party is a program that brings gang members, police officers and other neighbors together. Ray Suarez examines how the Summer Night Lights event is making the city safer. Read more

Destined to Witness

By: Hans Massaquoi

Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez

Length: 19 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

What would life be like for a black boy growing up in Nazi Germany? This unprecedented autobiography answers that question with the spellbinding true story of Hans J. Massaquoi's life in Hamburg during the height of Hitler's regime. Hans is the son of a black Liberian diplomat father and a white German mother. His father returns to Africa at the... Read more

Pilgrim's Wilderness

By: Tom Kizzia

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

Length: 10 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Into the Wild meets Helter Skelter in this riveting true story of a modern-day homesteading family in the deepest reaches of the Alaskan wilderness – and of the chilling secrets of its maniacal, spellbinding patriarch.
 
When Papa Pilgrim appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy with his wife and fifteen children in tow, his new... Read more

This Town

By: Mark Leibovich

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

Length: 12 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the nation's most acclaimed journalists, the New York Times' Mark Leibovich, presents a blistering, penetrating, controversial--and often hysterical--look at Washington's incestuous "media industrial complex." Read more

The Kid

By: Dan Savage

Narrated by: Dan Savage

Length: 7 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

Dan Savage's nationally syndicated sex advice column, "Savage Love," enrages and excites more than four million people each week. In The Kid, Savage tells a no-holds-barred, high-energy story of an ordinary American couple who wants to have a baby. Except that in this case the couple happens to be Dan and his boyfriend. That fact, in the face of... Read more

I Wear the Black Hat

By: Chuck Klosterman

Narrated by: Chuck Klosterman

Length: 7 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

One-of-a-kind cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman “offers up great facts, interesting cultural insights, and thought-provoking moral calculations in this look at our love affair with the anti-hero” (New York magazine).

Chuck Klosterman, “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine, has walked into the... Read more

Lost Girls

By: Robert Kolker

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

Length: 11 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

New York Times Bestseller • Now a Netflix FilmThe bestselling account of the lives of five young women whose fates converged in the perplexing case of the Long Island Serial Killer.“Rich, tragic...monumental...true-crime reporting at its best.”—Washington Post
One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert—after running through the oceanfront... Read more

Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble

By: Nora Ephron

Narrated by: Kathe Mazur

Length: 12 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

Two classic collections of Nora Ephron’s uproarious essays—tackling everything from feminism to the media, from politics to beauty products, with her inimitable charm and distinctive wit—now available in one audiobook. 
 
This edition brings together some of Ephron’s most famous writing on a generation of women (and men) who helped shape the way... Read more

Exploring the Psychology of Wealth, ‘Pernicious’ Effects of Economic Inequality

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 8 minutes

Abridged: No

It's been said that money is the root of all evil. Does money make people more likely to lie, cheat and steal? Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports on new research from the University of California, Berkeley about how wealth and inequality affects us psychologically. Read more

Prosperity, Compassion and Happiness

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Usually, as a country's GDP goes up, that nation's well-being tends to rise as well. But for the last 35 years, as GDP has grown in the United States, Americans' average happiness hasn't increased. Economics correspondent Paul Solman talks to researchers about how they study the connection between money and happiness. Read more

Second Suns

By: David Oliver Relin

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Length: 15 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

From the co-author of Three Cups of Tea comes the inspiring story of two very different doctors—one from the United States, the other from Nepal—united in a common mission: to rid the world of preventable blindness.
 
In this transporting book, David Oliver Relin shines a light on the work of Geoffrey Tabin and Sanduk Ruit, gifted... Read more

Clash!

By: Hazel Rose Markus & Alana Conner

Narrated by: Authors

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

As the world gets smaller, hotter, and flatter, people from different cultures are colliding like never before:
East Asian students now dominate Western schools and workplaces, yet crash into the so-called "bamboo ceiling" before reaching the top.Women are getting stuck as they rocket up the corporate ladder, while men are falling off the ladder... Read more

What Do Women Want?

By: Daniel Bergner

Narrated by: Charles Pasternak

Length: 6 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

When it comes to sex, common wisdom holds that men roam while women crave closeness and commitment. But in this provocative, headline-making book, Daniel Bergner turns everything we thought we knew about women's arousal and desire inside out. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with renowned behavioral scientists, sexologists,... Read more

Eating on the Wild Side

By: Jo Robinson

Narrated by: Erin Bennett

Length: 11 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

The next stage in the food revolution: a radical way to select fruits and vegetables and reclaim the flavor and nutrients we've lost.

Ever since farmers first planted seeds 10,000 years ago, humans have been destroying the nutritional value of their fruits and vegetables. Unwittingly, we've been selecting plants that are high in starch and sugar... Read more

On the Road Bike

By: Ned Boulting

Narrated by: Ned Boulting

Length: 8 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Ned Boulting has noticed something. It's to do with bikes. They're everywhere. And so are their riders. Some of these riders seem to be sporting sideburns and a few of them are winning things. Big things. Now Ned wants to know how on earth it came to this. And what, exactly is 'this'.

In On the Road Bike, Ned Boulting asks how Britain became so... Read more