Social Science Audiobooks | Non-Fiction

Devil Behind the Badge: The Horrifying Twelve Days of the Border Patrol Serial Killer

Rick Jervis (Author), Tbd (Narrator)

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Relationality: How Moving from Transactional to Transformational Relationships Can Reshape Our Lonel

For readers of Together and The Art of Gathering How moving from transactional to transformational relationships and organizations can save our democracy, nurture our connections, and make us happier and healthier. Powerful institutions, from schools to tech and social media companies, create breeding grounds for isolation by failing to invest in relational work. This obstacle stands in the way of our fight for racial equity, economic justice, and climate resilience. In Relationality, leading asexuality and relationship activist David Jay brings clarity to the crisis with a fresh perspective that expands upon the fundamental idea that all entities in the universe are connected. Jay draws from a range of vivid personal experiences, including his time spent helping tech workers and policymakers reform social media. This book is for people who believe in the power of relationships and want to see increased investment in relational work. Its scientifically grounded framework will help readers foster conversations about relational work, establish conditions for relationships to thrive, and quantify the impact of them. Equipping professionals and activists involved in nonprofit, political, and other types of relational work with the knowledge they need to fight for and utilize resources, Relationality shares valuable insight on: - The history of why institutions fail to invest in relationships - Reimagining ROI calculations to account for relational work - Using tools of prediction and emergence theory to build communities - How stories and data about relationships can help us direct resources toward relational work - Relational economics and the redistribution of wealth With isolation and loneliness on the rise in a post-lockdown world, Relationality offers a roadmap to nourish our connections toward a better, more liberated world-personally, organizationally, and in community.

David Jay (Author), David Jay, Tba (Narrator)

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The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building o

Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives-including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death-in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full "life cycle," historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating "ghost values" or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools. This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry's exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples' experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities. A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death. Winner of the 2018 Hamilton Book Award - from the University Coop (Austin, TX) Winner of the 2018 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize (SHEAR) Winner of the 2018 Phillis Wheatley Literary Award, from the Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage Finalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

Daina Ramey Berry (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Practicing Liberation Workbook: Radical Tools for Grassroots Activists, Community Leaders, Teachers,

The accompanying workbook to Practicing Liberation: essential skills, exercises, and journal prompts for social-change workers to protect boundaries, prevent burnout, and nourish organizational cultures of resilience and care What do you imagine a better world to look, feel, and sound like? Practicing Liberation Workbook shows that nourishing our movements and communities depends on nourishing ourselves-and that centering rest, prioritizing joy, and celebrating creativity and radical imagination is necessary for long-term change. To be sustainable and realize the transformation we're working toward, we need to care for our body, mind, and spirit, even (and especially) when the needs of our communities are urgent. In this accompanying workbook to Practicing Liberation, editors Hala Khouri and Tessa Hicks Peterson respond to the real needs of activists and changemakers-like healing from stress and burnout, processing grief and rage, and addressing overwhelm and disconnection. Examples of practices include: - Guided journal prompts for self-care critical reflections: Reflect on the ideas and practices you've inherited around survival and self-care. What did you learn about survival in your family of origin? What did you learn about self-care? - Embrace and release, an embodied exercise to support you in times of overwhelm - Shared reflections for building community: What experiences or circumstances have shaped you in your life? What gifts has this given you? What can't you see about the world as a result? What support would give you more tools or uplift your gifts in this work? - Meditations for self-forgiveness, equanimity, and connection with nature - Holding space and being present for others through embodied listening Readers are invited to try out the practices alone, with friends, in ceremony, at work, and in nature-to pick those that resonate most and use this toolkit in service of the care and transformation we each need to show up, sustain our work, and thrive for ourselves and our communities.

Tessa Hicks Peterson (Author), Hala Khouri, Tba, Tessa Hicks Peterson (Narrator)

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An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work

Through the lens of her years spent as a sex worker, Charlotte Shane offers a provocative and tender reckoning of what it means to be a heterosexual woman and a feminist in a misogynistic society. In her early twenties, Charlotte Shane quit her women's studies graduate program to devote herself to sex work because it was a way to devote herself to men. Her lifelong curiosity about male lust, love, selfishness, and social capital dovetailed with her own insatiable desire for intimacy to sustain a long career in escorting, with unexpectedly poignant results. Shane uses her personal and professional history to examine how men and women struggle in their attempts at romantic and sexual bonding, no matter how true their intentions. As she takes stock of her relationships—with clients, with her father, with friends, with married men, and later, with her own husband—she tells a candid and haunting tale of love, marriage, and (in)fidelity, as seen through the eyes of the perpetual "other woman." Braiding the personal and the universal, Shane's memoir is a merciless and moving love letter to straight men and an indictment of habitual dishonesty, a condemnation of every social constraint acting on heterosexual unions, and a hopeful affirmation of the possibility for true connection between men and women.

Charlotte Shane (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir

Barrett Brown went to prison for four years for leaking intelligence documents. He was released to Trump’s America. This is his story. After a series of escapades both online and off that brought him in and out of 4chan forums, the halls of power, heroin addiction, and federal prison, Barrett Brown is a free man. He was arrested for his part in an attempt to catalog, interpret, and disseminate top-secret documents exposed in a security lapse by the intelligence contractor Stratfor in 2011. An influential journalist who is also active in the hacktivist collective Anonymous, Brown recounts exploits from a life shaped by an often self-destructive drive to speak truth to power. With inimitable wit and style, palpable anger and conviction, he exposes the incompetence and injustices that plague media and politics, reflects on the successes and failures of the transparency movement, and shows the way forward in harnessing digital communication tools for collective action. But My Glorious Defeats is more than just the tale of the clever and hilarious Brown; it’s also a rigorously researched dissection of our decaying institutions and of human nature itself. As Brown makes clear, institutions are made of people—people with personal ambitions and personal vices—and it is people, just like him, just like us, who hold power. As optimistic as it is heartbreaking, My Glorious Defeats is an entertaining and illuminating manual for insurgency in the information age.

Barrett Brown (Author), Barrett Brown (Narrator)

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A Better Tomorrow: Life Lessons in Hope and Strength

Mina Smallman (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Mágia: Hungarian Myth, Magic, and Folklore

Explore the world of Hungarian Paganism with this book's impressive collection of history, lore, and traditions from the Carpathian basin. The Hungarian people, also known as the Magyars, fused pre-Christian and Christian beliefs into their identity, and that fusion remains today. Exploring mythology, daily life, magic, and life passages, this book reveals the old ways of Hungarian practitioners. Margit Toth introduces you to many aspects of the Magyar cosmos, from the creation story to homestead practices. Among many other topics, you will learn how to aid a restless spirit, what magical properties the Summer Solstice bonfire has, and why you should never wash clothes on a Tuesday. This book provides insight on ancestors, nature spirits, sacred foods, healing magic, divination, and even death.

Margit Tóth (Author), Ann Richardson (Narrator)

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To Be a Problem: A Black Woman's Survival in the Racist Disability Rights Movement

A searing critique of the disability rights movement from within, and a call for collective liberation that is pro-Black and centers disabled people of color For over twenty years, Dara Baldwin has often been the only person of color in the room when significant disability policy decisions are made. Disenfranchisement of people of color and multi-marginalized communities within the disability rights community is not new and has left many inside the community feeling frustrated and unheard. In To Be a Problem, Baldwin candidly shares her journey to becoming a disability activist and policymaker in DC while critiquing the disability rights community. She reveals the reality of erasure for many Black people and people of color in the disability community and argues that, in turn, many white disabled people center themselves within the movement without addressing their own white privilege. Disability rights groups have been centering white, straight, cisgender people while racial justice groups often fail to center disabled people, leading many Black and Brown disabled people to start their own Disability Justice organizations. Drawing from her unique vantage point, Baldwin calls readers to understand the shortcomings of the disability rights movement while inspiring us to push all movements towards a more inclusive and authentic liberation.

Dara Baldwin (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Drop In: The Gender Rebels Who Changed the Face of Skateboarding

A bad*ss story of the female, queer, bi, and nonbinary skaters who charted a path to the Olympics and changed the face of skateboarding. Who gets to tell the story of skateboarding? Drop In is the first book to recognize and historicize the female, queer, bi, and nonbinary humans who blazed the path that led to today’s more equitable skate culture. It wasn’t easy getting here. Like the rest of the world, skateboarding has long been patriarchal. In the 70s, it personified the punk rock, lock-up-your-daughters, middle-finger-to-the-man ethos. In the 80s, it was Miami Vice soundtracks and parachute pants, neon graphics and fingerless gloves. In the 90s it was New York City—graffiti, hip-hop, and skating in the street. Rarely did you see a woman’s name in a skate video—either on a deck or behind the lens. The four skateboarders at the heart of Drop In defied expectations of gender, talent, physical ability, and mental capacity to fight the status quo: Alana as the first openly nonbinary athlete in Olympic history; Vanessa as a trailblazing runaway, dominating contests while drinking to excess; Marbie as an accidental boundary-breaking trans icon; and Victoria as the skate rookie turned social media sensation. Drop In spotlights their paths from rebellious outsiders to recognized pioneers on the historic stage of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, where skateboarding made its historic debut. Their experiences reveal a side of skateboarding that’s never been recorded, amplifying voices that have, for too long, gone unheard.

Deborah Stoll (Author), Daru Oda, Deborah Stoll, Tbd (Narrator)

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The Lucky Ones: A Memoir

A moving memoir by a survivor of anti-Muslim violence in contemporary India that delicately weaves political and family histories in a tribute to India's vibrant multiethnic society and the resilience of its women and minorities, especially in the face of growing religious extremism "A warning, thrown to the world, and a stunning debut-Chowdhary is a much-needed new voice.'-Alexander Chee In 2002, Zara Chowdhary was sixteen years old and living with her family in Ahmedabad, one of India's fastest-growing metropolises, when a gruesome anti-Muslim pogrom upended her world. Instead of taking her school exams, she was put under a three-month lockdown with thousands of others, fearing for their community and their lives. The chief minister in the state at the time, Narendra Modi, accused of fomenting anti-Muslim violence, would become prime minister of India and lead a government committed to eroding the rights of India's 220 million Muslims. In The Lucky Ones, Chowdhary weaves the past and the present of her multigenerational Muslim family, juxtaposing the horrific violence of rising fascistic forces on the streets with the more mundane violence of patriarchal Indian joint families at the dinner table. Through the stories of sisters, daughters, and mothers raising each other, Chowdhary shows how women hold this world together with their ability to forgive, find laughter, and offer grace even as the world they know, and their place in it, is falling apart. With lyrical clarity and intimacy, The Lucky Ones is a poetic remembrance of how a country's promise of a multiethnic secular democracy can so easily dissolve and descend into extremism. Chowdhary's story is a protest against the erasure of India's Muslims, a testimony of a lost girlhood, and a testament to her family and country's entwined lives.

Zara Chowdhary (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Die Hot With a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity

Journalist and former Allure editor Sable Yong debuts with a sharp-toothed and hilarious essay collection about beauty and vanity, examining their stigmatization in the cultural zeitgeist, and how to shift the focus to use both for powerful tools for self-exploration, interpersonal connection, and cultural change. The beauty industry has a single mandate: be hot. In the same week that you might be encouraged to try curtain bangs, contouring, bleached eyebrows, laser facials, buccal fat removal, fillers, and “non-invasive” facelifts, you’re simultaneously absorbing mantras about self-care, body positivity, empowerment, and loving yourself just as you are. Overwhelmed yet? Fear not. Die Hot with a Vengeance delves into the machinations of this multi-billion-dollar industry, offering readers an expert analysis of its inner workings with the precision of a scalpel and the humor of a stand-up comedian. Along the way, Yong sets off to answer some of the biggest questions of our time: How do you break through the noise of beauty and wellness culture’s endless optimization protocols? How can you find actual authenticity in a world of performative artifice? Can the antidote to aging be found in a jar, tube, or at the end of a syringe? Do blondes really have more fun? Using Yong’s many years of experience as a beauty editor to unlock the industry’s myriad secrets, Die Hot with a Vengeance gives beauty and vanity a neutralizing make-over. At its best, beauty is so much more than an aesthetic; it’s an inspirational mindset. It’s a playfulness inherent to the practice of self-expression. And yet it’s difficult to engage playfully when it feels like beauty is an ever-moving target. We’re all subject to societal expectations surrounding beauty and vanity, enough so that breaking through the capitalist pressures can feel impossible. Yong argues that while the mandate may be for us to be hot, the beauty industry thrives on us absorbing its teachings so it can keep us in a constant feedback loop of appearance-based anxiety, forever perpetuating unattainable standards. Flipping that imperative, Yong’s debut collection poses the most important question of all: How do you discover your value of beauty so you can free yourself from the loud and bullshitty noise of all these entities telling you that you’re not good enough? Digging deep into our most pervasive and questionable beauty trends and conventions, Die Hot with a Vengeance offers an incisive yet wry dissection of one of our most enduring cultural addictions. Irreverent, side-splittingly funny, and astute, the book is as amusing as it is insightful, an instant classic for beauty-readers and aspirant hotties alike.

Sable Yong (Author), Sable Yong, TBD (Narrator)

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Social Science Audiobooks in Non-Fiction