Social Science Audiobooks | Non-Fiction

Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe Audiobook

Brought to you by Penguin. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics and network science, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe offers not just a history but a general theory of disaster. As Ferguson shows, governments must learn to become less bureaucratic and more 'antifragile' if we are to avoid the impending doom of irreversible decline. © Niall Ferguson 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Niall Ferguson (Author), Niall Ferguson (Narrator)

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Gender: A World History

Gender exists in almost every society as a way of organizing its people. Gender is used to assign certain responsibilities, obligations, and privileges to some, and to deny them to others. In Gender: A World History, Susan Kingsley Kent tells the story of this seemingly simple but in fact quite complex concept. With historical perspective she critically examines our everyday understandings of women and men, masculinity and femininity, and sexual difference in general. Central to this account is the conviction that gender is neither natural nor innocent. What passes for masculinity and femininity in one society might not do so in another. Even the passing of time can change what gender looks like in a particular culture. Thinking about the history of gender can also shed light on other types of relations, such as those between a government and its people, between different social classes, and between a colony and its colonizer. Ranging from prehistory to the present, this book presents a chronological picture of gender across the globe. From Hatshepsut and the rise of patriarchy in the ancient world, to the Bushido code of the samurai in wartime, to Susan B. Anthony and the women's rights movement in the United States, to the gay and trans rights movements of today, the force of gender in world history cannot be denied.

Susan Kingsley Kent (Author), Elizabeth Wiley (Narrator)

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On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual

The groundbreaking work on being homosexual in America-available again only from Penguin Classics and with a new foreword by Dan Savage Originally published in 1971, Merle Miller's On Being Different is a pioneering and thought-provoking book about being homosexual in the United States. Just two years after the Stonewall riots, Miller wrote a poignant essay for the New York Times Magazine entitled "What It Means To Be a Homosexual" in response to a homophobic article published in Harper's Magazine. Described as "the most widely read and discussed essay of the decade," it carried the seed that would blossom into On Being Different-one of the earliest memoirs to affirm the importance of coming out. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Merle Miller (Author), Paul Boehmer (Narrator)

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America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s

'Groundbreaking, deeply researched and profoundly heart-rending' Peniel Joseph, New York Times A radical reckoning with the racial inequality of America's past and present, by one of the leading scholars of policing and mass incarceration in the US Between 1964 and 1972, the United States endured domestic violence on a scale not seen since the Civil War. During these eight years, Black residents responded to police brutality and systemic racism by throwing punches and Molotov cocktails at police officers, plundering local businesses and vandalizing exploitative institutions. Ever since, Americans have been living in a nation and national culture created, in part, by the extreme violence of this period. In America on Fire, acclaimed professor Elizabeth Hinton draws on previously untapped sources to unravel this extraordinary history for the first time, arguing that we cannot understand the civil rights struggle without coming to terms with the astonishing violence, and hugely expanded policing regime, that followed it. A leading scholar of policing, Hinton underlines a crucial lesson in the book - that police violence precipitates community violence - and shows how it continues to escape policy makers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. Taking us from the uprising in Watts, Los Angeles in 1965 to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Hinton's urgent, eye-opening and much-anticipated America on Fire offers an unprecedented framework for understanding the crisis at the country's heart.

Elizabeth Hinton (Author), Shayna Small (Narrator)

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Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples

This volume will revise the way we look at the modern populations of Latin America and North America by providing a totally new view of the history of Native American and African American peoples throughout the hemisphere. Africans and Native Americans explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo, which no longer carry their original meanings. Jack Forbes presents strong evidence that Native American and African contacts began in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean and that Native Americans may have crossed the Atlantic long before Columbus.

Jack D. Forbes (Author), William Andrew Quinn (Narrator)

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For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality

For the Many presents an inspiring look at how US women and their global allies pushed the nation and the world toward justice and greater equality for all. Reclaiming social democracy as one of the central threads of American feminism, Dorothy Sue Cobble offers a bold rewriting of twentieth-century feminist history and documents how forces, peoples, and ideas worldwide shaped American politics. Cobble follows egalitarian women's activism from the explosion of democracy movements before World War I to the establishment of the New Deal, through the upheavals in rights and social citizenship at midcentury, to the reassertion of conservatism and the revival of female-led movements today. Cobble brings to life the women who crossed borders of class, race, and nation to build grassroots campaigns, found international institutions, and enact policies dedicated to raising standards of life for everyone. Listeners encounter famous figures, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Mary McLeod Bethune, together with less well-known leaders, such as Rose Schneiderman, Maida Springer Kemp, and Esther Peterson. Multiple generations partnered to expand social and economic rights, and despite setbacks, the fight for the many persists, as twenty-first-century activists urgently demand a more caring, inclusive world.

Dorothy Sue Cobble (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

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Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain's Empire

In the early seventeenth century, Britain took ruthless steps to deal with its unwanted citizens, forcibly removing men, women, and children from their homelands and sending them to far-flung corners of the empire to be sold off to colonial masters. This oppressive regime grew into a brutal system of human bondage which would continue into the twentieth century. Drawing on firsthand accounts, letters, and official documents, Graham Seal uncovers the traumatic struggles of those shipped around the empire. He shows how the earliest large-scale kidnapping and transportation of children to the American colonies were quickly bolstered with shipments of the poor, criminal, and rebellious to different continents, including Australia. From Asia to Africa, this global trade in forced labor allowed Britain to build its colonies while turning a considerable profit. Incisive and moving, this account brings to light the true extent of a cruel strand in the history of the British Empire.

Graham Seal (Author), Nigel Patterson (Narrator)

Audiobook

From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

We, as a nation, have become desensitized to the shock and pain in the wake of mass shootings. In the bottomless silence between gunshots, as political stalemate ensures inaction, the killing continues; the dying continues. From a Taller Tower attends to the silence that has left us empty in the aftermath of these atrocities. Veteran journalist Seamus McGraw chronicles the rise of the mass shooter to dismantle the myths we have constructed around the murderers and ourselves. In 1966, America's first mass shooter, from atop the University of Texas tower, unleashed a new reality: the fear that any of us may be targeted by a killer, and the complicity we bear in granting these murderers the fame or infamy they crave. Addressing individual cases in the epidemic that began in Austin, From a Taller Tower bluntly confronts our obsession with the shooters-and explores the isolation, narcissism, and sense of victimhood that fan their obsessions. Drawing on the experiences of survivors and first responders as well as the knowledge of mental health experts, McGraw challenges the notion of the 'good guy with a gun,' the idolization of guns (including his own), and the reliability of traumatized memory. Yet in this terrible history, McGraw reminds us of the humanity that can stop the killing and the dying.

Seamus Mcgraw (Author), Roger Wayne (Narrator)

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A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg

The epic story of Hasidic Williamsburg, from the decline of New York to the gentrification of Brooklyn. Hasidic Williamsburg is famous as one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy communities in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of New York City's toughest neighborhoods during an era of steep decline, only to later oppose and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a community of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely resisted the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification. By showing how Williamsburg's Hasidim avoided assimilation, Deutsch and Casper present both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.

Michael Casper, Nathaniel Deutsch (Author), Steven Jay Cohen (Narrator)

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The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America

"The Negro worked as farm hand and peasant proprietor, as laborer, artisan, and inventor and as servant in the house, and without him, America as we know it, would have been impossible."-W. E. B. Du Bois Although the Civil War marked an end to slavery in the United States, it would take another fifty years to establish the country's civil rights movement. Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois was among the first generation of African American scholars to spearhead this movement towards equality. As cofounder of the NAACP, he sought to initiate equality through social change, and he wrote books and essays that provide a revealing glimpse into the black experience of the times. Published in 1924 in response to growing racial tensions, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Gift of Black Folk explores the contributions African Americans have made to American society, detailing the importance of racial diversity to the United States. He chronicles their role in the early exploration of America, their part in developing the country's agricultural industry, their courage on the battlefields, and their creative genius in virtually every aspect of American culture. He also highlights the contributions of black women, proposing that their freedom could lead to freedom for all women. The Gift of Black Folk provides a powerful picture of the many struggles that paved the way for freedom and equality in our nation.

W. E. B. Du Bois (Author), Mirron Willis (Narrator)

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The Unknown History of Black Newspapers in America

The Black Press made a huge difference when it came to reporting to black Americans what was going on in black America. All the lynching's, court cases and protests that were ignored by the mainstream white media, black media outlets reported everything relative to blacks in society. . This needed overview shines a light on a forgotten part of black history.

Julius Kane (Author), Rosie O Toole (Narrator)

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Black Sheep In The Housekeeper's Room

''Ten o'clock! I must press on, or they'll all be in bed, I suppose. Beastly respectable, old Carruthers, from what I can make out from my mother, and what little I saw of him! Servants up to prayers and all that kind of thing. No chance of getting hold of her, if I can't make her know I am there, before those prayers come off. Glass of cold water and flat candlestick directly they're over, I suppose, and a kiss to Missy and God bless you all round, and off to bed! By George, what a life! What an infernal, moping, ghostly, dreary existence! And yet they've got money, these scoundrels, and old Carruthers could give you a cheque that would make you wink. Could! Yes, but wouldn't, especially to me! Ba, ba, black sheep, and all the rest of it! Here's a poor tainted mutton for you, without the wind being in the least tempered to him! Jove, it goes through me like a knife! There'll be a public somewhere near, I suppose, and when I have seen my mother, I'll step off there and have some hot rum-and-water before turning in. Hold up, there, you hawbuck brute, pull your other rein! What's the use of your lamps, if they don't show you people in the road?'' Yates was a British journalist, novelist and dramatist born in Edinburgh to the actor and theatre manager Frederick Henry Yates and was educated at Highgate School in London from 1840-1846. His first career was a clerk in the General Post Office, before entering journalism, working on the Court Journal and then Daily News. Yates was perhaps best known as proprietor and editor of The World society newspaper, which he established with Glenville Murray, which he edited under the pen name of 'Atlas', and which for a time was edited by Alexander Meyrick Broadley. The World, which was perceived as a newspaper chronicling upper class London Society, was a pioneer in 'personal journalism', such as the interview, which was later adopted by newspapers generally

Edmond Yates (Author), Doug Green (Narrator)

Audiobook

Social Science Audiobooks in Non-Fiction