Politics Audiobooks | LoveReading

The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language

Spoken by a quarter of the world's population, English is today's lingua franca-its common tongue. The language of business, popular media, and international politics, English has become commodified for its economic value and increasingly detached from any particular nation. This meteoric 'rise of English' has many obvious benefits to communication. But the rise of English has very real downsides at times generating intense legal conflicts. In Europe, imperatives of political integration, job mobility, and university rankings compete with pride in national language and heritage as countries like France attempt to curb its spread. In countries like India, South Africa, Morocco, and Rwanda, it has stratified society along lines of English proficiency and devalued commonly spoken languages. In Anglophone countries like the United States and England, English isolates us from the cultural and economic benefits of speaking other languages. In The Rise of English, Rosemary Salomone offers a commanding view of the unprecedented spread of English and the far-reaching effects it has on global and local politics, economics, media, education, and business.

Rosemary C. Salomone, Rosemary Salomone (Author), Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet

Brought to you by Penguin. People talk a lot about the problems with intensive farming. But the problem isn't the adjective. It's the noun. Around the world, farming has been wiping out vast habitats, depleting freshwater, polluting oceans, and accelerating global heating, while leaving millions undernourished and unfed. Increasingly, there are signs that the system itself is beginning to flicker. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, there is another way. Regenesis is an exhilarating journey into a new possible future for food, people and the planet. Drawing on the revelatory, rapidly advancing science of soil ecology, Monbiot shows how the hidden biological universe beneath our feet could transform what we eat and how we grow it. He travels to meet the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable growers who cultivate pests as well as potatoes; through producers of perennial grains who are liberating their fields from ploughs; to the scientists pioneering new forms of protein and fat that can be cooked into rich golden pancakes and much, much more. We start to see how the tiniest life forms in the soil might help us save the living world, allowing us to produce abundant, cheap, healthy food while returning vast swathes of land to the wild. Here, for the first time, is a profoundly hopeful, appetising and exciting vision of food: of revolutionary cultivation and cuisine that could nourish us all and restore our world of wonders. © George Monbiot 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

George Monbiot (Author), George Monbiot (Narrator)

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They Knew: The US Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

In 2015, a group of twenty-one young people sued the federal government for violating their constitutional rights by promoting the climate catastrophe, depriving them of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. They Knew offers evidence for their claims, presenting a devastating, play-by-play account of the federal government's role in bringing about today's climate crisis. James Speth, tapped by the plaintiffs as an expert on climate, documents how administrations from Carter to Trump-despite having information about climate change and the connection to fossil fuels-continued aggressive support of a fossil fuel based energy system. What did the federal government know and when did it know it? Speth asks, echoing another famous cover up. What did the federal government do and what did it not do? They Knew (an updated version of the Expert Report Speth prepared for the lawsuit) presents the most compelling indictment yet of the government's role in the climate crisis, showing a forty-year failure to take action. Since Juliana v. United States was filed, the federal government has repeatedly delayed the case. Yet even in legal limbo, it has helped inspire a generation of youthful climate activists.

James Gustave Speth (Author), Al Kessel (Narrator)

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Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis

Recent years have seen out of control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In Global Burning, Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel, and related, trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences. As political leaders and big business work together in the pursuit of profits and power, anti-environmentalism has become an essential political tool enabling the rise of extreme right governments and energizing their populist supporters. These are the governments that deny climate science, reject environmental protection laws, and foster exclusionary worldviews that exacerbate climate injustice. The widespread fires demand acknowledgment of the global systems of inequality that undergird them, connecting the political erosion of liberal democracy with the corrosion of the environment. In thinking through wildfires as environmental and political phenomenon, Global Burning challenges listeners to confront the interlocking powers that are ensuring our future ecological collapse.

Eve Darian-Smith (Author), Brigid Lohrey (Narrator)

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Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems

Much ink has been spilled in recent years talking about political divides and inequality in the United States. But these discussions too often miss one of the most important factors in the divisions among Americans: the fundamentally unequal nature of the nation's housing systems. And this divide deepens other inequalities. Increasingly, important life outcomes-performance in school, employment, even life expectancy-are determined by where people live and the quality of homes they live in. Public policies enacted by federal, state, and local governments helped create and reinforce the bad housing outcomes endured by too many people. Taxes, zoning, institutional discrimination, and the location and quality of schools, roads, public transit, and other public services are among the policies that created inequalities in the nation's housing patterns. Fixer-Upper is the first book assessing how the broad set of local, state, and national housing policies affect people and communities. It proposes practical policy changes than can make stable, decent-quality housing more available and affordable for all Americans in all communities.

Jenny Schuetz (Author), Suzie Althens (Narrator)

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The Art of War

The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; lit. 'Sun Tzu's Military Method') is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The work, which is attributed to the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu ('Master Sun'), is composed of 13 chapters. Each one is devoted to a different set of skills (or 'art') related to warfare and how it applies to military strategy and tactics. For almost 1,500 years it was the lead text in an anthology that was formalized as the Seven Military Classics by Emperor Shenzong of Song in 1080. The Art of War remains the most influential strategy text in East Asian warfare and has influenced both Far Eastern and Western military thinking, business tactics, legal strategy, lifestyles and beyond. The book contains a detailed explanation and analysis of the 5th-century BC Chinese military, from weapons and strategy to rank and discipline. Sun also stressed the importance of intelligence operatives and espionage to the war effort. Considered one of history's finest military tacticians and analysts, his teachings and strategies formed the basis of advanced military training for millennia to come. The book was translated into French and published in 1772 (re-published in 1782) by the French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot. A partial translation into English was attempted by British officer Everard Ferguson Calthrop in 1905 under the title The Book of War. The first annotated English translation was completed and published by Lionel Giles in 1910. Military and political leaders such as the Chinese communist revolutionary Mao Zedong, Japanese daimyō Takeda Shingen, Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp, and American military general Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. are all cited as having drawn inspiration from the book.

Sun Tzu (Author), Phil Chenevert (Narrator)

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Sigmund Freud: Das Unbehagen in der Kultur: Ein Grundlagenwerk der Kulturtheorie

Im Jahre 1930 veröffentlichte Sigmund Freud diese Schrift, in der er den Menschen als Meister der 'Verdrängung' beschreibt, die dieser in allen Feldern der Zivilisation unterworfen sei. In der Realität des Lebens sei der Mensch zu Lustverzicht, Zügelung, Umlenkung und Verdrängung der Triebe gezwungen.

Sigmund Freud (Author), Sven Görtz (Narrator)

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Summary: Killing the Killers: Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard: The Secret War Against Terrorism

This rather lengthy summary book is meant to complement the original. It is not intended to replace the fine book by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard, #1 bestselling authors. Readers soon find themselves injected into the worldwide war on terror, which started more than two decades ago on September 11, 2001. America went into battle mode as the World Trade Center towers crumbled, the Pentagon burned, and a tiny number of passengers fought frantically to prevent a third jet from carrying out its murderous flight plan. Killing The Killers tells the story of America's long struggle against radicals who plotted and carried out not just the 9/11 atrocities but hundreds of others throughout the globe, finally destroying whole countries in their pursuit for power. Killing The Killers follows the United States' fight against Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere, as well as specific targets of these organizations' most renowned commanders. O'Reilly and Dugard provide an irresistible narrative of our era's most crucial battle with new detail and well-sourced material.

Scott Campbell (Author), Scott Campbell (Narrator)

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United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis

Psychiatrist Mark McDonald diagnoses our country as suffering from a mass delusional psychosis, driven by a pandemic of fear in response to COVID-19. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, LA-based psychiatrist Mark McDonald grew increasingly concerned by the negative mental health effects he witnessed among his patients—and Americans nationwide. These negative effects—stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, domestic violence, suicidal ideation—were all directly traceable to the climate of fear being stoked by public health authorities and irresponsibly amplified by national media. These fears in turn drove a hysterical overreaction from government in the form of draconian lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates of questionable value. But the fear did not abate and quickly took on a life of its own, becoming an unstoppable force in all our lives. At last McDonald began to speak out, explaining that America is actually suffering from two pandemics: a viral one and a psychological one, a “pandemic of fear” that is in many ways more dangerous and damaging than the virus itself. Rooted in the natural anxieties of women on behalf of their children and families, inflamed and amplified by sensationalistic media, and driven over the top by hamfisted authoritarian measures from those in power, McDonald diagnoses the country at large as suffering from a mass delusional psychosis. This is not a metaphor. The malady itself is very real. Whether we can regain our collective sanity as a society remains to be seen.

Mark Mcdonald (Author), Axel Bosley (Narrator)

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The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights

A definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the world Jo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands. The book describes the results of state-engineered 'land reform' policies beginning in Ireland in 1881 until US-led interests and the World Bank effectively killed them off in 1974. The Long Land War provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution alongside an unflinching critique of its failures, set against the background of the rise and fall of nationalism, communism, internationalism, information technology, and free-market economics. In considering how we could make the earth livable for all, she works out the important relationship between property ownership and justice on a changing planet.

Jo Guldi (Author), Wendy Tremont King (Narrator)

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Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements

Examining the significance of the Movement for Black Lives, Reckoning uncovers a broadly applicable argument for the democratic necessity of social movements. Barack Obama famously said that the purpose of social movements is to get a seat at the table. However, as Deva Woodly argues in Reckoning-a sweeping account of the meaning and purpose of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)-the value of such movements is something much more profound: they are necessary for the health and survival of democracy. Drawing from on-the-ground interviews with activists in the movement, Woodly analyzes the emergence of the M4BL, its organizational structure and culture, and its strategies and tactics. She also shows how a unique political philosophy-Radical Black Feminist Pragmatism-served as an intellectual foundation of the movement and documents the role it played in transforming public meanings, public opinion, and policy. Interweaving theoretical and empirical observations throughout, Woodly provides both a unique portrait of the movement and a powerful explanation of the labor social movements do in democracy. A major work that speaks to both scholars and activists, Woodly's account of the rise and spread of M4BL will reshape our understanding of why the movement is so important-and so necessary-for democracy.

Deva R. Woodly (Author), Deanna Anthony (Narrator)

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Sigmund Freud: Das Ich und das Es: Ein Grundlagenwerk der Psychoanalyse

Sigmund Freud (Author), Sven Görtz (Narrator)

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