Politics & Economy audiobooks

The Long Surrender

By: Burke Davis

Narrated by: J. Rodney Turner

Length: 11 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

In April 1865, Richmond fell to the Union army and Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to his Northern counterpart, Ulysses S. Grant, at the Appomattox Court House. But the Civil War was far from over.



Determined to keep Confederate dreams of secession alive, President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet fled the burning capital city. With Union troops in... Read more

Carbon Democracy

By: Timothy Mitchell

Narrated by: Liam Gerrard

Length: 12 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption, and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle... Read more

Pharmanomics

By: Nick Dearden

Narrated by: Gareth Richards

Length: 9 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

In Pharmanomics, investigative journalist Nick Dearden digs down into the way we produce our medicines and finds that Big Pharma is failing us, with catastrophic consequences.



Big Pharma is more interested in profit than health. This was made clear as governments rushed to produce vaccines during the Covid pandemic. Behind the much-trumpeted... Read more

Dark Victory

By: Dan E. Moldea

Narrated by: Lee Goettl

Length: 13 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Founded in 1924, the Music Corporation of America got its start booking acts into speakeasies run by such notorious Chicago mobsters as Al Capone. How then, in only a few decades, did MCA become the driving force behind music publishing, radio, recording artists, Hollywood, and the burgeoning television industry? Enter Ronald Reagan.



By the late... Read more

Nasty Politics

By: Thomas Zeitzoff

Narrated by: Joel Richards

Length: 10 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

A novel explanation for why politicians insult, accuse, and threaten their opponents, even though voters say they don't like it.



Why do politicians engage in nasty politics? Why do they use insult, accusations, intimidation, and in rare cases violence against their domestic political opponents? In Nasty Politics, Thomas Zeitzoff answers these... Read more

Rocking in the Free World

By: Nicholas Tochka

Narrated by: Derek Dysart

Length: 9 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

Progressive and libertarian, anti-Communist and revolutionary, Democratic and Republican, quintessentially American but simultaneously universal. By the late 1980s, rock music had acquired a dizzying array of political labels. These claims about its political significance shared one common thread: that the music could set you free.



Rocking in the... Read more

Lincoln

By: Allen C. Guelzo

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 4 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

Beneath the surface of the apparently untutored and deceptively frank Abraham Lincoln ran private tunnels of self-taught study, a restless philosophical curiosity, and a profound grasp of the fundamentals of democracy. Now, in Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, the award-winning Lincoln authority Allen C. Guelzo offers a penetrating look into... Read more

American History

By: Paul S. Boyer

Narrated by: Lee Goettl

Length: 4 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

Ranging from the earliest Native American settlers to the presidency of Barack Obama, this Very Short Introduction offers an illuminating account of politics, diplomacy, and war as well as the full spectrum of social, cultural, and scientific developments that shaped our country.

Here is a masterful picture of America's achievements and... Read more

Marijuana Legalization

By: Jonathan P. Caulkins, Beau Kilmer & Mark A.R. K...

Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins

Length: 12 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

Should we legalize marijuana? If we legalize, what in particular should be legal? Just possessing marijuana and growing your own? Selling and advertising? If selling becomes legal, who gets to sell? Corporations? Co-ops? The government? What regulations should apply? How high should taxes be? Different forms of legalization could bring very... Read more

A Short History of European Law

By: Tamar Herzog

Narrated by: Ana Clements

Length: 10 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

A Short History of European Law brings to life 2,500 years of legal history, tying current norms to the circumstances of their conception. Tamar Herzog describes how successive legal systems built upon one another, from ancient times through the European Union. Roman law formed the backbone of each configuration, though the way it was used and... Read more

Dear Mr Bigelow

By: Frances Woodsford

Narrated by: Patience Tomlinson

Length: 12 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

Dear Mr Bigelow is an enchanting selection of weekly 'pen-pal' letters written between 1949 and 1961 from an unmarried woman working at the Pier Approach Baths in Bournemouth, to a wealthy American widower, living on Long Island, New York. Frances Woodsford and Commodore Paul Bigelow never met, and there was no romance - she was in her forties... Read more

Behind the Black Door

By: Sarah Brown

Narrated by: Sarah Brown

Length: 14 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

'Today, Gordon's words are simple and heartfelt. He promises, as his own school motto said, "to do his utmost". I know that the same will go for me, too. We turn to the door, greeting the policeman on duty. It is time to play our part in contributing to what happens next in government and a new life behind the black door.'

In this personal memoir... Read more

The Railway Man

By: Eric Lomax

Narrated by: Bill Paterson

Length: 8 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

A naive young man, a railway enthusiast and radio buff, was caught up in the fall of the British Empire at Singapore in 1942. He was put to work on the 'Railway of Death' - the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma. Exhaustively and brutally tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio, Lomax was emotionally ruined by his experiences. Almost... Read more

The ANC Billionaires

By: Pieter du Toit

Narrated by: Joe Vaz

Length: 7 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

‘We were talking about the rise of Japan, about Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars … globalisation, technology. And they were still banging on about the Freedom Charter.’ – Anglo American’s Michael Spicer on the ANC in the mid-1980s In 1985, a group of white South African business leaders, led by Gavin Relly, the executive chairperson of Anglo American,... Read more

Hunter Killer Spy

By: James E. Mack

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

‘For over a decade I worked as a secret agent in a clandestine army unit, tracking down terrorists and facilitating their arrest, capture or death. This is my story.’

James E. Mack has been in many tight spots in his life, ever since joining the JSG, a secretive British army unit that recruited and ran agents in warzones. He cut his teeth in... Read more

Taking Up Space

By: Chelsea Kwakye & Ore Ogunbiyi

Narrated by: Chelsea Kwakye & Ore Ogunbiyi

Length: 5 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Taking Up Space written and read by Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi.

THE FLAGSHIP 2019 RELEASE OF #MERKY BOOKS
____________________________
‘Brilliant’ CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS
‘Hugely important’ PAULA AKPAN
‘Essential’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO
____________________________
As a minority in a predominantly white... Read more

Just Price in the Markets

By: Charles R. Geisst

Narrated by: Will Tulin

Length: 9 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

The question of what constitutes a fair price has been at the center of market interactions since the time of Aristotle. Should a seller sell to the highest bidder, or is there some other standard, such as a morally defined price, to be applied? Charles R. Geisst traces the ways that philosophers, religious leaders, and economists have sought to... Read more

The Grift

By: Clay Cane

Narrated by: Clay Cane

Length: 10 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

GRIFTER [grif-ter] noun1. a con or scam artist, a hustler or a sell-outAfter the Civil War, the pillars of Black Republicanism were a balanced critique of both political parties, civil rights for all Americans, reinventing an economy based on exploitation, and, most importantly, building thriving Black communities. How did Black Republicanism... Read more

Washington’s Marines

By: Major General Jason Q. Bohm, USMC

Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin

Length: 12 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

The fighting prowess of United States Marines is second to none, but few know of the Corps' humble beginnings and what it achieved during the early years of the American Revolution. That oversight is fully rectified by Jason Bohm's eye-opening Washington's Marines: The Origins of the Corps and the American Revolution, 1775-1777.



The story begins... Read more

The Other Great Game

By: Sheila Miyoshi Jager

Narrated by: Kathleen Li

Length: 20 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two "great games": one, pitted the tsar's empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, Sheila Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and... Read more

The Capital Order

By: Clara E. Mattei

Narrated by: Susan Ericksen

Length: 15 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. Today, an important question remains: What if solvency was never the goal?



In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual... Read more

Atomic Days

By: Joshua Frank

Narrated by: Will Tulin

Length: 7 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Once home to the United States's largest plutonium production site, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is laced with 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. The threat of an explosive accident at Hanford is all too real—an event that could be more catastrophic than Chernobyl.



The EPA designated Hanford the most toxic place in... Read more

Theoderic the Great

By: Hans-Ulrich Wiemer

Narrated by: Julian Elfer

Length: 23 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

In the year 493, the leader of a vast confederation of Gothic warriors, their wives, and children personally cut down Odoacer, the man famous for deposing the last Roman emperor in 476. That leader became Theoderic the Great (454–526). This engaging history of his life and reign immerses readers in the world of the warrior-king who ushered in... Read more

The Secret Listener

By: Yuan-Tsung Chen

Narrated by: Rebecca Lam

Length: 12 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

The history of China in the twentieth century is comprised of a long series of shocks: the 1911 revolution, the civil war between the communists and the nationalists, the Japanese invasion, the revolution, the various catastrophic campaigns initiated by Chairman Mao between 1949 and 1976, its great opening to the world under Deng, and the... Read more