Social Science Audiobooks | Non-Fiction

Activists for Freedom, Equity and Justice

Kevin Danaher, Medea Benjamin (Author), Michael Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

In this remarkable book, Anna Quindlen, one of America’s favorite novelists and a Pulitzer Prize– winning columnist, once again gives us wisdom, opinions, insights, and reflections about current events and modern life. “Always insightful, rooted in everyday experience and common sense...Quindlen is so good that even when you disagree with what she says, you still love the way she says it,” said People magazine about her number one New York Times bestseller Thinking Out Loud, and the same can be said about Loud and Clear. With her trademark insight and her special ability to convey the impact public events have on ordinary lives, Quindlen here combines commentary on American society and the world at large with reflections on being a woman, a writer, and a mother. In these pieces, first written for Newsweek and The New York Times, Loud and Clear takes on topics ranging from social change to raising children, from the political and emotional aftermath of September 11 to personal values, from the impact on individuals of global events to the growth that can be gained by spending summer days staring into the middle distance. Grounding the public in the private, connecting people to each other and to the greater world, Quindlen encourages us to develop authentic lives, even as she serves as a catalyst for political and social change. “Anna Quindlen’s beat is life, and she’s one hell of a terrific reporter,” said Susan Isaacs, and Quindlen’s unique qualities of understanding and discernment, everywhere evident in her previous bestsellers, including A Short Guide to a Happy Life and Living Out Loud, can be found on every page of this provocative and inspiring book.

Anna Quindlen (Author), Anna Quindlen, Kathe Mazur (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead

In this provocative audiobook author David Callahan examines the cheating epidemic-at work, in school, on the ballfield and everywhere else-that is the new American plague. Now more than ever, people are bending rules and breaking laws to get what they want. From the Enron scandal to the dot-com collapses to the plagiarism that has rocked the publishing world, this remarkable book exposes the new culture of cheating while offering reasonable suggestions for righting the wrongs.

David Callahan (Author), Richard Davidson (Narrator)

Audiobook

Circles, Conversation and Community

These three guests believe that if Americans, both progressive and conservative, take time to speak freely and truly listen to one another we’ll find that our views have much more in common than we realize. At a time when our democracy seems threatened, these wisdom leaders inspire us to join together to move beyond the middle ground and find a higher ground.

Juanita Brown, Phd, Leif Utne, Vicki Robin (Author), Michael Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

Of Whales and Belly Flowers, Rebirth and Hope

Masculine and feminine, earth and sea, forest and desert, nature and nurture…the balance of life shows up beautifully and metaphorically in the relationship and the work of Robin Kobaly and Doug Thompson. She is one of the nation's foremost experts on native desert plants; he is a leader in experiential research with marine mammals.

Doug Thompson, Robin Kobaly (Author), Justine Willis Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town

In March 1986, while living in Brooklyn, Chris Bohjalian and his wife were cab-napped on a Saturday night and taken on a forty-five-minute joy ride in which the driver ignored all traffic lights and stop signs. Around midnight he deposited the young couple on a near-deserted street, where police officers were about to storm a crack house. Bohjalian and his wife were told to hit the ground for their own protection. While lying on the pavement, Bohjalian's wife suggested that perhaps it was time to move to New England. Months later they traded in their co-op in Brooklyn for a century-old Victorian house in Lincoln, Vermont (population 975), and Bohjalian began chronicling life in that town in a wide variety of magazine essays and in his newspaper column, "Idyll Banter." These pieces, written weekly for twelve years and collected here for the first time, serve as a diary of both this writer's life and how America has been transformed in the last decade. Rich with idiosyncratic universals that come with being a parent, a child, and a spouse, Chris Bohjalian's personal observations are a reflection of our own common experience. "Chris Bohjalian is a terrific columnist, thoughtful and thought-provoking. Just like me! No, really, this guy is good." , Dave Barry, author of Boogers Are My Beat 'The best book I've ever read about life in a contemporary village. There's no doubt that Chris Bohjalian has established himself as one of America's finest, most thoughtful, and most humane writers.', Howard Frank Mosher From the Hardcover edition.

Chris Bohjalian (Author), Chris Bohjalian (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse

In The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook draws upon three decades of wide-ranging research and thinking to make the persuasive assertion that almost all aspects of Western life have vastly improved in the past century--and yet today, most men and women feel less happy than in previous generations. Why this is so and what we should do about it is the subject of this book. Between contemporary emphasis on grievances and the fears engendered by 9/11, today it is common to hear it said that life has started downhill, or that our parents had it better. But objectively, almost everyone in today's United States or European Union lives better than his or her parents did. Still, studies show that the percentage of the population that is happy has not increased in fifty years, while depression and stress have become ever more prevalent. The Progress Paradox explores why ever-higher living standards don't seem to make us any happier. Detailing the emerging science of "positive psychology," which seeks to understand what causes a person's sense of well-being, Easterbrook offers an alternative to our culture of crisis and complaint. He makes a Compelling case that optimism, gratitude, and acts of forgiveness not only make modern life more fulfilling but are actually in our self-interest. Seemingly insoluble problems of the past, such as crime in New York City and smog in Los Angeles, have proved more tractable than they were thought to be. Likewise, today's "impossible" problems, such as global warming and Islamic terrorism, can be tackled too. Like The Tipping Point, this book offers an affirming and constructive way of seeing the world anew. The Progress Paradox will change the way you think about your place in the world, and about our collective ability to make it better.

Gregg Easterbrook (Author), Rick Adamson (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other

A national best-selling author and founder of the TransAfrica forum, Randall Robinson is one of the most respected voices of the African-American community. In this powerful book, he convincingly argues that African Americans must fight the growing presence of modern prisons, which hold an alarmingly disproportionate number of black inmates.

Randall Robinson (Author), Cornell Womack (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women : Exploding the Estrogen Myth

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 fact, estrogen treatments may increase the risk of cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis.

Barbara Seaman (Author), Barbara Caruso (Narrator)

Audiobook

There Must Be a Pony In Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Futu

"AOL had found itself at the edge of disaster so frequently that one of its first executives, a brassy Vietnam veteran and restaurateur named Jim Kimsey, had taken the punch line of an old joke popularized by Ronald Reagan and made it into an unlikely mantra for the company. It concerned a very optimistic young boy who happened upon a huge pile of horse manure and began digging excitedly. When someone asked him what he was doing covered in muck, the foolish boy answered brightly, 'There must be a pony in here somewhere!'" -From the Prologue If you're wondering what happened after "a company without assets acquired a company without a clue," as Kara Swisher wryly writes, it's time to crack open this trenchant book about the doomed merger of America Online and Time Warner. On a quest to discover how the deal of the century became the messiest merger in history, Swisher delivers a rollicking narrative and a keen analysis of this debacle that is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what it all means for the digital future. Packed with new revelations and on-the-record interviews with key players, it is the first detailed examination of the merger's aftermath and also looks forward to what is coming next. It certainly has not been a pretty picture so far-with $100 billion in losses, a sinking stock price, employees in revolt, and lawsuits galore. As Swisher writes, "It is hard not to feel a bit queasy about the whole sorry mess. . . . It felt a bit like I was watching someone fall down a flight of stairs in slow motion, and every bump and thump made me wince. It made me reassess old ideas and wonder what I had gotten wrong. And it left me deeply confused as to what had happened and, more important, what was coming next." For Swisher, finding the answers to what went awry is important because she remains a staunch believer in the digital future-maybe not in the AOL Time Warner merger, but in the essential idea at the heart of it that someday the distinction of old and new media will no longer exist. Borrowing from Winston Churchill, Swisher calls it "the end of the beginning" of the digital revolution. "By that, I mean that it is from the ashes of this bust that the really important companies of the next era will emerge. And that evolution will, I believe, be shaped by what happened-and what is happening now-at AOL Time Warner." To figure it all out, Swisher takes her reader on a journey that begins with a portrait of two wildly different corporate cultures and businesses that somehow came to believe, in the crucible of the red-hot Internet era, that they could successfully join forces and achieve unprecedented growth and success. When the merger was announced in early 2000, the irresistible combination was hailed as the new paradigm and its executives-Steve Case, Jerry Levin, Bob Pittman-as popular icons of the future. But after the boom so spectacularly turned to bust and the visions of New Media Supremacy lay in ruins, Swisher searches for clues about where the merger went wrong and who is to blame. More important, she looks to the future of both AOL Time Warner and the Internet as she seeks to answer the key question that the noise of the disaster has all but drowned out. Will the demise of the AOL Time Warner merger be the final and inevitable chapter of the dot-com debacle or will it herald a new paradigm altogether? This book, then, is a primer for the time to come, using the story of the AOL Time Warner merger as the vehicle to show the troubled journey into the future.

Kara Swisher, Lisa Dickey (Author), Kara Swisher (Narrator)

Audiobook

Why Men Don't Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes: The Ultimate Guide to the Opposite Sex

Do you know the top seven things men do that drive women nuts? Or the real reason women cry more than men do? What are men really looking for in a woman—both at first sight and for the long-term? These are only the starting points for Barbara and Allan Pease as they discuss the very real—and often very funny—differences between the sexes. Why Men Don’t Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes takes a look at some of the issues that have confused men and women for centuries. Using new findings on the brain, studies of social changes, evolutionary biology, and psychology, the Peases teach you how to make the most of your relationships—or at least begin to understand where your partner is coming from. They help women understand why men avoid commitment, what drives them to lie, and how to decode male speech to find out what they are really saying. They explain to men why women nag, how they use emotional blackmail, and how to understand (and take advantage of!) the top-secret scoring system all women apply. They also dish about the top turn-ons--and turn-offs--for both sexes. Laced with their trademark humor, Why Men Don’t Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes addresses a host of nitty-gritty battlegrounds as well, from channel surfing and toilet seats to shopping and communication. Already a #1 bestseller in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Holland, Spain, Brazil, Portugal, Belgium, Ireland, France, Czech Republic, India, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, Why Men Don’t Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes is the answer to understanding the opposite sex. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Allan Pease, Barbara Pease (Author), Lee Adams, Stephen Hoye (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Roots of Violence

In this dialogue, Susan Griffin explores the relationship between what happens in our intimate lives and the violence we express individually and as a nation. She explains, 'The idea that we have to get somebody with a lot of muscles to take care of us happens when our core relationship to our own feelings has been erased.'

Susan Griffin (Author), Michael Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

Social Science Audiobooks in Non-Fiction