Social Science audiobooks

Triumph of the City

By: Edward Glaeser

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 12 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the three percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly. Or are they?



As Edward Glaeser proves in this myth-shattering book, cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and... Read more

Everything Is Obvious

By: Duncan J. Watts

Narrated by: Duncan J. Watts

Length: 8 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

By understanding how and when common sense fails, we can improve our understanding of the present and better plan for the future. 

Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more... Read more

Join the Club

By: Tina Rosenberg

Narrated by: Dana Green

Length: 16 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

In the style of The Tipping Point or Freakonomics, a groundbreaking book that will change the way you look at the world.

The fearless Tina Rosenberg has spent her career tackling some of the world's hardest problems. The Haunted Land, her searing work on how Eastern Europe faced the crimes of Communism, garnered both the National Book Award and... Read more

Herland

By: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Narrated by: William Dufris

Length: 7 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, first published in 1915, is a feminist utopian novel that describes an isolated society composed entirely of women—a progressive, environmentally conscious land where peace and rationality reign and poverty is unknown. Told from the perspective of Vandyk Jennings, a male sociology student who sets out with his... Read more

The Great Shame

By: Thomas Keneally

Narrated by: John McDonough

Length: 35 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

Thomas Keneally, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's List, is universally praised for crafting smooth narratives from authentic historical events. With The Great Shame, he turns his insightful eye toward the Irish struggle through the nineteenth century. In sharp contrast to much of Europe, Ireland was a terrible place to be during... Read more

Idiot America

By: Charles P. Pierce

Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot

Length: 9 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

The culture wars are over and the idiots have won. This is a veteran journalist's caustically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States.The three Great Premises of Idiot America:– Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units. – Anything can be true if someone... Read more

Economic Paths Diverged Over 30 Years

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 9 minutes

Abridged: No

As part of his series on Making Sen$e of financial news, economics correspondent Paul Solman reports from two Ohio counties -- Crawford and Delaware -- that had similar incomes 30 years ago, but their economies and populations have since taken very different paths. Read more

Citadels of Power: Castles in History and Archaeology

By: Thomas Finan

Narrated by: Thomas Finan

Length: 7 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

Professor Thomas J. Finan conducts an enthralling series of lectures on a subject that is an enduring part of the popular imagination: the castle. Professor Finan examines the castle from a variety of contemporary perspectives, including those of history, archaeology, geography, and landscape studies. The course also covers the morphology of... Read more

The Social Animal

By: David Brooks

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Length: 16 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a... Read more

Las crónicas de Jackson Heights

By: Orlando Tobon

Narrated by: Jorge Pupo

Length: 5 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

El padrino de Jackson Heights hace mucho mas que arreglos de viajes desde su diminuta agencia escondida en un rincon del sector de Queens conocido como la Pequena Colombia de Nueva York. Con frecuencia Fernando Padron es la unica mano amiga para miles de inmigrantes latinos. Entre sus diversos oficios estan el de contador, buscador de empleos,... Read more

West End Girls - Abridged

By: Barbara Tate

Narrated by: Kate O'Sullivan

Length: 6 hours

Abridged: Yes

Now a Top Ten bestseller. Barbara Tate was 17 when she heard the whispered word that would change her life: Soho. It would take four years for Barbara to escape her loveless home but when she finally made it to the forbidden streets of Soho - just as London was recovering from the trauma of the second world war - things would never be the same... Read more

The Information

By: James Gleick

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Length: 16 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
 
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our... Read more

On Gold Mountain

By: Lisa See

Narrated by: Kate Reading

Length: 18 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

From the bestselling author of The Island of Sea Women, here is the true story of the one-hundred-year-odyssey of the author’s Chinese-American family, combining years of research with “fascinating family anecdotes, imaginative details, and the historical details of immigrant life” (Amy Tan, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club).

"As... Read more

The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women

By: Barbara Seaman

Narrated by: Barbara Caruso

Length: 7 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

For over 40 years Barbara Seaman has been a leading women's health advocate. Now she blows the lid off the estrogen industry in this fascinating book that holds the power to improve-possibly even save-women's lives. In America 30 million women take estrogen. Seaman shows that this powerful hormone is hardly the cure-all some claim it is. In... Read more

Quirk

By: Hannah Holmes

Narrated by: Susan Denaker

Length: 10 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Who are you? It’s the most fundamental of human questions. Are you the type of person who tilts at windmills, or the one who prefers to view them from the comfort of an air-conditioned motorcoach? Our personalities are endlessly fascinating—not just to ourselves but also to our spouses, our parents, our children, our co-workers, our neighbors.... Read more

Never Say Die

By: Susan Jacoby

Narrated by: Laural Merlington

Length: 13 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

In a narrative that combines the intensely personal with social, economic, and historical analysis, Susan Jacoby turns an unsparing eye on the marketers of longevity—pharmaceutical companies, lifestyle gurus, and scientific businessmen who suggest that there will soon be a "cure" for the "disease" of aging. She separates wishful hype from... Read more

I Beat the Odds

By: Michael Oher

Narrated by: Michael Boatman

Length: 6 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

The football star made famous in the hit film The Blind Side reflects on how far he has come from the circumstances of his youth.

Michael Oher is the young man at the center of the true story depicted in The Blind Side movie (and book) that swept up awards and accolades. Though the odds were heavily stacked against him, Michael had a burning... Read more

Faster - Abridged

By: James Gleick

Narrated by: James Gleick

Length: 5 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: Yes

From the bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of Genius and Chaos, a bracing new work about the accelerating pace of change in today's world.

Most of us suffer some degree of "hurry sickness." a malady that has launched us into the "epoch of the nanosecond," a need-everything-yesterday sphere dominated by cell phones, computers,... Read more

The Next Decade

By: George Friedman

Narrated by: Bruce Turk

Length: 9 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

The author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Next 100 Years now focuses his geopolitical forecasting acumen on the next decade and the imminent events and challenges that will test America and the world, specifically addressing the skills that will be required by the decade’s leaders.

The next ten years will be a time of massive... Read more

Reality is Broken

By: Jane McGonigal

Narrated by: Julia Whelan

Length: 13 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

More than 174 million Americans are gamers, and the average young person in the U.S. will spend 10,000 hours gaming by the age of 21. According to world-renowned game designer Jane McGonigal, the reason for this mass exodus to virtual worlds is that videogames are increasingly fulfilling genuine human needs. In this groundbreaking exploration of... Read more

Guns, Germs, and Steel

By: Jared Diamond

Narrated by: Doug Ordunio

Length: 16 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history.
 
Having done field work in New Guinea for more than 30 years, Jared Diamond presents the geographical and ecological factors that have shaped the modern world. From the viewpoint of an evolutionary... Read more

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

By: Amy Chua

Narrated by: Amy Chua

Length: 5 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

“Courageous and thought-provoking.” —David Brooks, The New York Times

“Breathtakingly personal . . . [Chua’s] tale is as compelling as a good thriller.” —The Financial Times

"[F]ascinating. . . . the most stimulating book on the subject of child rearing since Dr. Spock." —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Chua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,... Read more

Just Like Us

By: Helen Thorpe

Narrated by: Paula Christensen

Length: 15 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Just Like Us tells the story of four high school students whose parents entered this country illegally from Mexico. All four of the girls have grown up in the United States, and all four want to live the American dream, but only two have documents. As the girls attempt to make it into college, they discover that only the legal pair see a clear... Read more

Anständig essen (Gekürzt) - Abridged

By: Karen Duve

Narrated by: Karen Duve

Length: 4 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Lebt es noch oder isst Du es schon? Karen Duve gehörte nicht eben zur Gesundheitsfraktion. Bratwürstchen und Gummibären wanderten genauso in ihren Einkaufswagen wie Schokolade und Curryketchup in 1-L-Plastikflaschen. Doch dann zog sie mit jemandem zusammen, der schnell den Spitznamen Jiminy Grille erhielt - nach dem personifizierten Gewissen der... Read more