Social Science audiobooks

A Tomb With a View – The Stories & Glories of Graveyards

By: Peter Ross

Narrated by: Peter Ross

Length: 10 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

'In his absorbing book about the lost and the gone, Peter Ross takes us from Flanders Fields to Milltown to Kensal Green, to melancholy islands and surprisingly lively ossuaries . . . a considered and moving book on the timely subject of how the dead are remembered, and how they go on working below the surface of our lives.' - Hilary... Read more

Dying of Politeness

By: Geena Davis

Narrated by: Geena Davis

Length: 7 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

From two-time Academy Award winner and screen icon Geena Davis, the surprising tale of her “journey to badassery”—from her epically polite childhood to roles that loaned her the strength to become a powerhouse in Hollywood.At three years old, Geena Davis announced she was going to be in movies. Now, with a slew of iconic roles and awards under... Read more

Running Out

By: Lucas Bessire

Narrated by: John Chancer

Length: 6 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Finalist for the National Book Award This audiobook narrated by John Chancer recounts an intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair.... Read more

Tightrope

By: Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn

Narrated by: Jennifer Garner, Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl W...

Length: 9 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of the acclaimed, best-selling Half the Sky now issue a plea--deeply personal and told through the lives of real Americans--to address the crisis in working-class America, while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure.

With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us... Read more

Get the Picture

By: Bianca Bosker

Narrated by: Bianca Bosker

Length: 10 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2024 BY NPR, TIME, AND THE ECONOMIST

“Get the Picture is one of the funniest books I’ve read . . . Brilliant.” —The Washington Post

“A gripping and often hilarious investigation into the art world. . . . Bosker goes full Tom Wolfe.” —TIME

“Funny, whip-smart, and gorgeously written, Get the... Read more

Ejaculate Responsibly

By: Gabrielle Stanley Blair

Narrated by: Gabrielle Stanley Blair

Length: 3 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

In Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair offers a provocative reframing of the abortion issue in post-Roe America. In a series of 28 brief arguments, she deftly makes the case for moving the abortion debate away from controlling and legislating women’s bodies and instead directs the focus on men’s lack of accountability in preventing unwanted... Read more

Seek You

By: Kristen Radtke

Narrated by: Kristen Radtke

Length: 1 hour 58 minutes

Abridged: No

From the acclaimed author of Imagine Wanting Only This—a timely and moving meditation on isolation and longing, both as individuals and as a society. • One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2021

There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of... Read more

Tomorrow Will Be Different

By: Sarah McBride

Narrated by: Sarah McBride

Length: 9 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

“A brave, powerful memoir” (People) that will change the way we look at identity and equality in this country, from the activist elected as the first openly transgender member of Congress in U.S. history

“The energy and vigor Sarah has brought to the fight for equality is ever present in this book.”—Vice President Kamala Harris

“If you’re living... Read more

Four Lost Cities

By: Annalee Newitz

Narrated by: Chloe Cannon

Length: 8 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes listeners on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site... Read more

Being Seen

By: Elsa Sjunneson

Narrated by: Elsa Sjunneson

Length: 6 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

A deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else.

As a deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness—much to the confusion of... Read more

The Way We Are

By: Hugh Mackay

Narrated by: Hugh Mackay

Length: 11 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Australia's leading social psychologist examines our society today and asks timely and urgent questions about its future

Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. Yet none of our differences-whether based on ethnicity, politics, religion, cultural tastes and preferences, or gender-are nearly as significant as the humanity... Read more

Moby Dyke

By: Krista Burton

Narrated by: Sarah Beth Pfeifer

Length: 12 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

A former Rookie contributor and creator of the popular blog Effing Dykes investigates the disappearance of America’s lesbian bars by visiting the last few in existence.

Lesbian bars have always been treasured safe spaces for their customers, providing not only a good time but a shelter from societal alienation and outright persecution. In 1987,... Read more

Good Boy

By: Jennifer Finney Boylan

Narrated by: Jennifer Finney Boylan & Kelsey Navarro

Length: 7 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

This program includes an introduction read by the author.

From bestselling author of She’s Not There, New York Times opinion columnist, and human rights activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, a memoir of the transformative power of loving dogs.

This is a book about dogs: the love we have for them, and the way that love... Read more

The Crazies

By: Amy Gamerman

Narrated by: Anna Sale

Length: 17 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

A dazzling piece of narrative nonfiction about land lust and the American West, The Crazies tells the story of a wind farm that triggers a 21st century range war between a struggling fifth-generation rancher and the billionaires next door.

Most locals in Big Timber, Montana learn to live with the wind. Rick Jarrett sought his fortune in it. Like... Read more

Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Narrated by: January LaVoy

Length: 1 hour 1 minute

Abridged: No

New York Times Best Seller
A Skimm Reads Pick
An NPR Best Book of 2017

From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today--written as a letter to a friend.

A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise... Read more

Not "A Nation of Immigrants"

By: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett

Length: 12 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States

Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly... Read more

The True Believer

By: Eric Hoffer

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

Length: 5 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

“Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” —New YorkerThe famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” (Wall Street Journal) by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman.A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer... Read more

The Last Whalers

By: Doug Bock Clark

Narrated by: Jay Snyder

Length: 11 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

In this "immersive, densely reported, and altogether remarkable first book [with] the texture and color of a first-rate novel" (New York Times), journalist Doug Bock Clark tells the epic story of the world's last subsistence whalers and the threats posed to a tribe on the brink.

A New York Times Notable Book​
A New York Times Editors' Choice
Winner... Read more

Unbelievable (Movie Tie-In)

By: T. Christian Miller & Ken Armstrong

Narrated by: Hillary Huber, T. Christian Miller & Ken Armstrong

Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Now the Netflix Limited Series Unbelievable, starring Toni Collette, Merritt Wever, and Kaitlyn Dever • Two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists tell the riveting true crime story of a teenager charged with lying about having been raped—and the detectives who followed a winding path to arrive at the truth.
 
“Gripping . . . [with a] John... Read more

Ghettoside

By: Jill Leovy

Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman

Length: 13 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, USA TODAY, AND CHICAGO TRIBUNE • A masterly work of literary journalism about a senseless murder, a relentless detective, and the great plague of homicide in America

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE... Read more

Valley So Low

By: Jared Sullivan

Narrated by: Lee Osorio & Jared Sullivan

Length: 12 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

A riveting courtroom drama about the victims of one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S. history—and the country lawyer determined to challenge the notion that, in America, justice can be bought

For more than fifty years, a power plant in the small town of Kingston, Tennessee,  burned fourteen thousand tons of coal a day, gradually... Read more

Long Time Coming

By: Michael Eric Dyson

Narrated by: Michael Eric Dyson

Length: 4 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

"As a narrator, the reverence and tenderness Dyson communicates in his letters--addressed to victims of racist violence Elijah McClain, Emmett Till, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney--invoke the experience of listening in on a holy epistle. Don't miss this." -- AudioFile Magazine

This... Read more

Having and Being Had

By: Eula Biss

Narrated by: Alex McKenna

Length: 7 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME , NPR, INSTYLE, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

“A sensational new book [that] tries to figure out whether it’s possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society. . . . The results are enthralling.” —Associated Press 

A timely and arresting new look at affluence by the New York... Read more

Pseudoscience

By: Lydia Kang & Nate Pedersen

Narrated by: Hillary Huber

Length: 9 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

From the authors of Quackery, a visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science. 

From the easily disproved to the wildly speculative, to  straight-up hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science—it’s a light-hearted look into why we insist on believing in things... Read more