Social Science audiobooks

Finding Oprah's Roots

By: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

“Before I have a big meeting or decision to make,” says Oprah Winfrey, “I go and I sit with the ancestors. Literally, I go and sit in my closet and I say their names. I just say their names so that when I walk into the space, I don’t walk alone.”

This audiobook will help millions of African Americans never again to walk alone.
What’s more, it... Read more

All the Money in the World

By: Peter W. Bernstein & Annalyn Swan

Narrated by: Marc Cashman

Length: 14 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Published to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Forbes 400, ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, the work of a team of prominent editors and business writers, goes behind the celebrated list to paint a vivid and revealing portrait of the wealthiest Americans of the past quarter century. Abundantly anecdotal, with insights gleaned from... Read more

A Slave No More

By: David W. Blight

Narrated by: Arthur Morey & Dominic Hoffman

Length: 9 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

Slave narratives are extremely rare. Of the one hundred or so of these testimonies that survive, a mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the men who wrote them, join that exclusive group.

Wallace Turnage was a teenage field hand on an Alabama... Read more

Mirage

By: Nina Burleigh

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 10 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

Little more than two hundred years ago, only the most reckless or eccentric Europeans had dared traverse the unmapped territory of the modern-day Middle East. Its history and peoples were the subject of much myth and speculation–and no region aroused greater interest than Egypt.

It was not until 1798, when an unlikely band of scientific... Read more

Be Happy Without Being Perfect

By: Alice D. Domar, Ph.D. & Alice Lesch Kelly

Narrated by: Karen White

Length: 9 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

BONUS: Includes the quiz: How Much of a Perfectionist Are You?*

Do you have trouble going to bed at night when there’s a mess in the kitchen? Do you think you would be happier if only you could lose weight, be a better parent, work smarter, reduce stress, exercise more, and make better decisions? You’re not perfect. But guess what? You don’t have... Read more

McMafia

By: Misha Glenny

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 15 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

Misha Glenny's groundbreaking study of global organized crime is now the inspiration for an 8-part AMC crime drama starring James Norton (War and Peace), Juliet Rylance, and David Strathairn. 

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the deregulation of international financial markets in 1989, governments and... Read more

The Logic of Life

By: Tim Harford

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 8 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Life sometimes seems illogical. Individuals do strange things: take drugs, have unprotected sex, mug each other. Love seems irrational, and so does divorce. On a larger scale, life seems no fairer or easier to fathom: Why do some neighborhoods thrive and others become ghettos? Why is racism so persistent? Why is your idiot boss paid a fortune... Read more

Outcasts United

By: Warren St. John

Narrated by: Lincoln Hoppe

Length: 12 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

The extraordinary tale of a refugee youth soccer team and the transformation of a small American town

Clarkston, Georgia, was a typical Southern town until it was designated a refugee settlement center in the 1990s, becoming the first American home for scores of families in flight from the world’s war zones—from Liberia and Sudan to Iraq and... Read more

Traffic

By: Tom Vanderbilt

Narrated by: Marc Cashman

Length: 13 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

Would you be surprised that road rage can be good for society? That most crashes happen on sunny, dry days? Or that you can gauge a nation’s driving behavior by its levels of corruption? These are only a few of the remarkable dynamics that Tom Vanderbilt explores in this fascinating tour through the mysteries of the road.

Based on exhaustive... Read more

Things I've Been Silent About

By: Azar Nafisi

Narrated by: Naila Azad

Length: 13 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

I started making a list in my diary entitled “Things I Have Been Silent About.” Under it I wrote: “Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran.” I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about... Read more

The Snakehead

By: Patrick Radden Keefe

Narrated by: Feodor Chin

Length: 12 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

In this thrilling panorama of real-life events, the bestselling author of Empire of Pain investigates a secret world run by a surprising criminal: a charismatic middle-aged grandmother, who from a tiny noodle shop in New York’s Chinatown managed a multi-million dollar business smuggling people.

“Reads like a mashup of The Godfather and Chinatown,... Read more

The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

By: Charles Eisenstein

Narrated by: Paul Geiger

Length: 10 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

As seen on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday

A beacon of hope in the face of our current world crises, this uplifting book demonstrates how embracing our interconnectedness is key to world transformation

In a time of social and ecological crisis, what can we as individuals do to make the world a better place? This inspirational and thought-provoking... Read more

Dispelling Wetiko

By: Paul Levy

Narrated by: Keith L. O'Brien

Length: 14 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

There is a contagious psychospiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called "wetiko"—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people... Read more

Media Control

By: Noam Chomsky

Narrated by: Noam Chomsky

Length: 1 hour 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Noam Chomsky’s backpocket classic on wartime propaganda and opinion control begins by asserting two models of democracy—one in which the public actively participates, and one in which the public is manipulated and controlled. According to Chomsky, "propaganda is to democracy as the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state," and the mass media is the... Read more

To Hell with All That

By: Caitlin Flanagan

Narrated by: Julia Fletcher

Length: 5 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Presented as a series of essays, it follows the natural course of women’s lives. Read more

Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants

By: James Wolcott

Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris

Length: 7 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants is a hilarious and scathing critique of the so-called news establishment. Wolcott’s book pokes, prods, and stirs up controversy. It also makes some serious points about the lamentable state of our news, and our nation. Read more

Buried in the Bitter Waters

By: Elliot Jaspin

Narrated by: Don Leslie

Length: 10 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

Jaspin exposes a shocking history of racial cleansing in the United States, and one that, alarmingly, continues to affect the geography of race in America to this day. Read more

The Power of Myth

By: Joseph Campbell & Bill Moyers

Length: 5 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

The complete soundtrack from the phenomenally popular PBS series whose message about myth, ritual, and spiritual potentialities exhilarated millions of people.

Contents:
Program 1: The Hero's Adventure
Program 2: The Message of the Myth
Program 3: The First Storytellers
Program 4: Sacrifice and Bliss
Program 5: Love and the Goddess
Program 6: Masks... Read more

Breakthrough

By: Gwen Ifill

Narrated by: Gwen Ifill

Length: 8 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

A veteran journalist surveys the American political landscape and illuminates the evolution of the African-American politician—and the future of American democracy.

Gwen Ifill began her journalism career at the Boston Herald in 1977, covering race riots by telephone. It was too risky for a young black reporter to venture onto the grounds of... Read more

Haiti After the Earthquake

By: Paul Farmer

Narrated by: Meryl Streep

Length: 14 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

On January 12, 2010, a major earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the greater part of the capital was demolished. Dr. Paul Farmer, U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, who had worked in the country for nearly thirty years treating infectious diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS, and former... Read more

The Velvet Rage

By: Alan Downs, PhD

Narrated by: Alan Downs

Length: 7 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

The most important issue in a gay man’s life is not “coming out,” but coming to terms with the invalidating past. Despite the progress made in recent years, many gay men still wonder, “Are we better off?” The byproduct of growing up gay in a straight world continues to be the internalization of shame, rejection, and anger—a toxic cocktail that... Read more

NPR American Chronicles: Women's Equality

By: NPR

Length: 3 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

NPR explores the issues, struggles, and triumphs of the American women’s movement, from early pioneers to modern groundbreakers and leaders of today who fight to preserve hard-won rights. Profiles of Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony provide insights into the origins of the movement, while reflections from Betty... Read more

Poor Economics

By: Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo

Narrated by: Brian Holsopple

Length: 11 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

Billions of government dollars, and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs, are dedicated to helping the world’s poor. But much of their work is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best, harmful misperceptions at worst.
 
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in... Read more

Master of the Mountain

By: Henry Wiencek

Narrated by: Brian Holsopple

Length: 11 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Henry Wiencek’s eloquent, persuasive book—based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson’s papers—opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson’s... Read more