Social Science audiobooks
Atlantic
By: Simon Winchester
Narrated by: Simon Winchester
Length: 14 hours 30 minutes
Abridged: No
""Variably genial, cautionary, lyrical, admonitory, terrifying, horrifying and inspiring…A lifetime of thought, travel, reading, imagination and memory inform this affecting account."" —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Blending history and anecdote, geography and reminiscence, science and exposition, New York Times bestselling author Simon... Read more
View audiobookIn Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks - Abridged
By: Adam Carolla
Narrated by: Adam Carolla
Length: 6 hours 41 minutes
Abridged: Yes
A couple years back, I was at the Phoenix airport bar. It was empty except for one heavy-set, gray bearded, grizzled guy who looked like he just rode his donkey into town after a long day of panning for silver in them thar hills. He ordered a Jack Daniels straight up, and that's when I overheard the young guy with the earring behind the bar... Read more
View audiobookRunning the Books
By: Avi Steinberg
Narrated by: Dustin Rubin
Length: 12 hours 1 minute
Abridged: No
Avi Steinberg is stumped. After defecting from yeshiva to Harvard, he has only a senior thesis essay on Bugs Bunny to show for his effort. While his friends and classmates advance in the world, he remains stuck at a crossroads, unable to meet the lofty expectations of his Orthodox Jewish upbringing. And his romantic existence as a freelance... Read more
View audiobookWhen Janey Comes Marching Home
By: Laura Browder
Narrated by: a full cast
Length: 4 hours 33 minutes
Abridged: No
Women are officially barred from combat in the American armed services, yet in today's wars, where there are no front lines, the ban on combat is virtually meaningless. More than in any previous conflict in our history, American women are engaging with the enemy, suffering injuries, and even sacrificing their lives in the line of duty.When Janey... Read more
View audiobookThe Taste for Civilization
By: Janet A. Flammang
Narrated by: Pam Ward
Length: 12 hours 56 minutes
Abridged: No
From table talk to farmers' markets, analyzing the cultural politics of what and how we eatThis audiobook explores the idea that table activities - the mealtime rituals of food preparation, serving, and dining - lay the foundation for a proper education on the value of civility, the importance of the common good, and what it means to be a good... Read more
View audiobookIn Deep Water
By: Peter Lehner
Narrated by: Tom Weiner
Length: 4 hours 26 minutes
Abridged: No
Deepwater Horizon was supposed to be the cutting edge of energy exploration: drilling five thousand feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, the $560 million rig would be indispensable in helping to solve the ongoing energy crisis.Then, on April 20, 2010, BP’s dismal safety record came home to roost. An explosion followed by a massive... Read more
View audiobookThe Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics
By: James Kakalios
Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
Length: 9 hours 24 minutes
Abridged: No
In the pulp magazines and comics of the 1950s, it was predicted that the future would be one of gleaming utopias, with flying cars, jetpacks, and robotic personal assistants. Obviously, things didn't turn out that way. But the world we do have is actually more fantastic than the most outlandish predictions of the science fiction of the... Read more
View audiobookAmerican Colossus
By: H. W. Brands
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
Length: 23 hours 27 minutes
Abridged: No
In a grand-scale narrative history, the bestselling author of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize now captures the decades when capitalism was at its most unbridled and a few breathtakingly wealthy businessmen utterly transformed America from an agrarian economy to a world power.
The years between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth... Read more
The Souls of Black Folk
By: W. E. B. Du Bois
Narrated by: Mirron Willis
Length: 8 hours 32 minutes
Abridged: No
"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," writes Du Bois, in one of the most prophetic works in all of American literature.First published in 1903, this collection of fifteen essays dared to describe the racism that prevailed at that time in America—and to demand an end to it. Du Bois' writing draws on his early... Read more
View audiobookThe Fiery Trial
By: Eric Foner
Narrated by: Norman Dietz
Length: 18 hours 7 minutes
Abridged: No
In this landmark work of deep scholarship and insight, Eric Foner gives us the definitive history of Abraham Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. Foner begins with Lincoln's youth in Indiana and Illinois and follows the trajectory of his career across an increasingly tense and shifting political terrain from Illinois to Washington, D.C.... Read more
View audiobookReligious Diversity
By: PBS NewsHour
Narrated by: PBS NewsHour
Length: 7 minutes
Abridged: No
Paul Solman talks with author Robert Putnam about his new book American Grace, which delves into the role of religion in the United States. Read more
View audiobookThe Deeds of My Fathers
By: Paul David Pope
Narrated by: Keith Szarabajka
Length: 11 hours 37 minutes
Abridged: No
A story that reads like The Godfather has been crossed with Citizen Kane. The Deeds of My Fathers is the riveting true story of two men, a father and a son, who each started with nothing and built an empire.Generoso Pope, Sr., an Italian immigrant, arrived in New York in 1906 with only pennies in his pocket. He got a job shoveling sand, but... Read more
View audiobookMysterious Sightings In the Sky
By: Jacques Vallee, Ph.D.
Narrated by: Michael Toms
Length: 57 minutes
Abridged: No
During the past century, individuals, newspapers, and military agencies have recorded thousands of UFO incidents, giving rise to much speculation about flying saucers, visitors from other planets, and alien abductions. But the extraterrestrial phenomenon did not begin in the present era. The first case reported turns out to be in the 1500s B.C.... Read more
View audiobookThe Killer of Little Shepherds
By: Douglas Starr
Narrated by: Erik Davies
Length: 12 hours 24 minutes
Abridged: No
A riveting true crime story that vividly recounts the birth of modern forensics.
At the end of the nineteenth century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher, known and feared as “The Killer of Little Shepherds,” terrorized the French countryside. He eluded authorities for years—until he ran up against prosecutor Emile Fourquet and Dr. Alexandre... Read more
The Dead Beat
By: Marilyn Johnson
Narrated by: Marilyn Johnson
Length: 6 hours 42 minutes
Abridged: No
Marilyn Johnson was enthralled by the remarkable lives that were marching out of this world—so she sought out the best obits in the English language and the people who spent their lives writing about the dead. She surveyed the darkest corners of Internet chat rooms, and made a pilgrimage to London to savor the most caustic and literate obits of... Read more
View audiobookBlack Migration From the Jim Crow South
By: PBS NewsHour
Narrated by: PBS NewsHour
Length: 8 minutes
Abridged: No
In her new book The Warmth of Other Suns, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and professor Isabel Wilkerson digs into the 'The Great Migration' that took place from 1915 to 1970, when 6 million African-Americans left the South to go north and west in search of a better life. Jeffrey Brown speaks with the author. Read more
View audiobookThe Grace of Silence
By: Michele Norris
Narrated by: Michele Norris
Length: 5 hours 47 minutes
Abridged: No
In the wake of talk of a “postracial” America upon Barack Obama’s ascension as president of the United States, Michele Norris, cohost of National Public Radio’s flagship program All Things Considered, set out to write, through original reporting, a book about “the hidden conversation” on race that is unfolding nationwide. She would, she thought,... Read more
View audiobookTo You We Shall Return
By: Joseph M. Marshall III
Narrated by: Joseph M. Marshall III
Length: 4 hours 53 minutes
Abridged: No
“Grandmother, you who listen and hear all, you from whom all good things come…It is your embrace we feel when we return to you.”This traditional Lakota prayer to Grandmother Earth opens Joseph Marshall III’s newest work, a meditation on our connection to the land and an exhortation to respect it. Using a combination of personal anecdote,... Read more
View audiobookThe Coke Machine
By: Michael Blanding
Narrated by: George K. Wilson
Length: 12 hours 59 minutes
Abridged: No
Ever since its "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" commercials from the 1970s, Coca-Cola has billed itself as the world's beverage, uniting all colors and cultures in a mutual love of its caramel-sweet sugar water. The formula has worked incredibly well, making it one of the most profitable companies on the planet and Coca-Cola the world's... Read more
View audiobookThe Lost Dogs
By: Jim Gorant
Narrated by: Richard Powers
Length: 10 hours 8 minutes
Abridged: No
This is an inspiring story of survival and our powerful bond with man’s best friend in the aftermath of the nation’s most notorious case of animal cruelty.Animal lovers and sports fans were shocked when the story broke about NFL player Michael Vick’s brutal dogfighting operation. But what became of the dozens of dogs who survived? As acclaimed... Read more
View audiobookComposing a Further Life
By: Mary Catherine Bateson
Narrated by: Sevanne Kassarjian
Length: 10 hours 22 minutes
Abridged: No
Mary Catherine Bateson sees aging today as an "improvisational art form calling for imagination and willingness to learn," and in this ardent, affirming study, she relates the experiences of men and women—herself included—who, upon entering this second adulthood, have found new meaning and new ways to contribute, composing their lives in new... Read more
View audiobookI Live in the Future & Here's How It Works
By: Nick Bilton
Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
Length: 7 hours 59 minutes
Abridged: No
Are we driving off a digital cliff and heading for disaster, unable to focus, maintain concentration, or form the human bonds that make life worth living? Are media and business doomed and about to be replaced by amateur hour?
The world, as Nick Bilton—with tongue-in-cheek—shows, has been going to hell for a long, long time, and what we are... Read more
Has Religious Tolerance Changed in America?
By: PBS NewsHour
Narrated by: PBS NewsHour
Length: 15 minutes
Abridged: No
NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown moderates a conversation among four religious leaders and experts on the tolerance-or intolerance-of different religions and cultures in America, nine years after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Read more
View audiobookFury
By: Koren Zailckas
Narrated by: Koren Zailckas
Length: 10 hours 8 minutes
Abridged: No
The author of the iconic New York Times bestseller Smashed undertakes a quest to confront her own anger.
In the years following the publication of her landmark memoir, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Koren Zailc Read more