Social Science audiobooks

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

By: Patton Oswalt

Narrated by: Patton Oswalt

Length: 3 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

Now in paperback, from a “multi-faceted, medium-hopping, culture skewering performer” (SPIN), this is a journey through the world of Patton Oswalt, best known for his roles in film (Big Fan and Ratatouille) and television (The King of Queens and The United States of Tara), but also beloved for his ascerbic, highly eloquent, and wildly funny... Read more

Stephen Fry On The Phone The Complete Radio 4 Series

By: Stephen Fry

Narrated by: Stephen Fry

Length: 1 hour 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Stephen Fry traces the evolution of the mobile phone, from hefty executive bricks that required a separate briefcase to carry the battery, to the smartphones available today. There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people on the planet: Stephen Fry talks to the backroom boys who made it all possible and hears how the technology... Read more

Practical Wisdom

By: Barry Schwartz & Kenneth Sharpe

Narrated by: Barry Schwartz

Length: 10 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

The surest route to a happier, more productive life and future

 

Most of us want to succeed. And most of us want to do the right thing. But we often forget that the way to

succeed is by doing the right thing, as Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe remind us in Practical Wisdom:

The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. When the institutions that shape... Read more

American Freak Show

By: Willie Geist

Narrated by: Johnny Heller & Jo Anna Perrin

Length: 4 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

In just three short years, Willie Geist has gone from behind-the-scenes producer at MSNBC to rising on-air star, as the host of Way Too Early with Willie Geist and cohost of Morning Joe. He's fast, he's funny—something of an early-morning Jon Stewart.



Now, in his first book, Geist focuses on America's ongoing parade of giant pop culture... Read more

The Vampire

By: Alan Dundes

Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin

Length: 6 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

Finally, the truth about vampires. Vampires are the most fearsome and fascinating of all creatures of folklore. For the first time, detailed accounts of the vampire and how its tradition developed in different cultures are gathered in one volume by eminent folklorist Alan Dundes. Leading scholars from the fields of Slavic studies, history,... Read more

The Golden Thirteen

By: Paul Stillwell

Narrated by: Alan Bomar Jones

Length: 8 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

In January 1944, sixteen black enlisted men gathered at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois to begin a cram course that would turn them into the U.S. Navy's first African American officers on active duty. The men believed that if they failed they would set back the course of racial justice, so they banded together and all sixteen... Read more

Disintegration

By: Eugene Robinson

Narrated by: Alan Bomar Jones

Length: 7 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

The African American population in the United States has always been seen as a single entity: a "Black America" with unified interests and needs. In his groundbreaking book Disintegration, longtime Washington Post journalist Eugene Robinson argues that, through decades of desegregation, affirmative action, and immigration, the concept of Black... Read more

The Town That Food Saved

By: Ben Hewitt

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Length: 7 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

Over the past several years, Hardwick, Vermont, a typical hardscrabble farming community of three thousand residents, has jump-started its economy and redefined its self-image through a local, self-sustaining food system unlike anything else in America. Even as the recent financial downturn threatens to cripple small businesses and privately... Read more

American Grace

By: David E. Campbell & Robert D. Putnam

Narrated by: Dan John Miller

Length: 18 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

American Grace takes its findings from two of the largest, most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America, plus in-depth studies of diverse congregations—among them a megachurch, a Mormon congregation, a Catholic parish, a reform Jewish synagogue, and an African American congregation.



From abortion to gay... Read more

Learning to Die in Miami

By: Carlos M. N. Eire

Narrated by: Robert Fass

Length: 11 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

Carlos Eire's story of a boyhood uprooted by the Cuban Revolution quickly lures us in, as eleven-year-old Carlos and his older brother Tony touch down in the sun-dappled Miami of 1962—a place of daunting abundance where his old Cuban self must die to make way for a new, American self waiting to be born.



In this enchanting new work, narrated in... Read more

The War for Late Night

By: Bill Carter

Narrated by: Sean Kenin

Length: 15 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

A dramatic account of the politics and personalities behind NBC's calamitous attempt to reinvent late-night television.

When NBC decided to move Jay Leno into prime time to make room for Conan O'Brien to host the Tonight show-a job he had been promised five years earlier-skeptics anticipated a train wreck for the ages. It took, in fact, only a... Read more

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

Keep the Change

By: Steve Dublanica

Narrated by: Dan John Miller

Length: 9 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Tipping is huge in America. Almost everyone leaves at least one tip every day. More than five million American workers depend on them, and we spend $66 billion on tips each year. And everyone recognizes that queasy feeling - in bars and restaurants, barbershops and beauty parlors, hotels and strip clubs, and everywhere else - when the check... Read more

Frank

By: James Kaplan

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Length: 22 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Bestselling author James Kaplan redefines Frank Sinatra in a triumphant new biography that includes many rarely seen photographs.

Frank Sinatra was the best-known entertainer of the twenti­eth century—infinitely charismatic, lionized and notori­ous in equal measure. But despite his mammoth fame, Sinatra the man has remained an enigma. As Bob... Read more

In 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

Running 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

When 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

The 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

In 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

The 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

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

American 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 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

Religious 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