Social Science audiobooks

The Idealist

By: Justin Peters

Narrated by: Corey Brill

Length: 9 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

This smart, “riveting” (Los Angeles Times) history of the Internet free culture movement and its larger effects on society—and the life and shocking suicide of Aaron Swartz, a founding developer of Reddit and Creative Commons—written by Slate correspondent Justin Peters “captures Swartz flawlessly” (The New York Times Book Review).

Aaron Swartz... Read more

The Internet of Us

By: Michael P. Lynch

Narrated by: Dan Woren

Length: 6 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

With far-reaching implications, this urgent treatise promises to revolutionize our understanding of what it means to be human in the digital age.
We used to say "seeing is believing"; now googling is believing. With 24/7 access to nearly all of the world's information at our fingertips, we no longer trek to the library or the encyclopedia shelf... Read more

American Girls

By: Nancy Jo Sales

Narrated by: Thérèse Plummer & Nancy Jo Sales

Length: 14 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

A New York Times Bestseller


Instagram. Whisper. YouTube. Kik. Ask.fm. Tinder. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media. What it is doing to an entire generation of young women is the subject of award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales’s riveting and explosive American Girls.

With extraordinary... Read more

Fire and Brimstone

By: Michael Punke

Narrated by: Christopher Grove

Length: 9 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Revenant--basis for the award-winning motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio--tells the remarkable story of the worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history. 

The worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history began a half hour before midnight on June 8, 1917, when fire broke out... Read more

The Power Paradox

By: Dacher Keltner

Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith

Length: 4 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

A revolutionary and timely reconsideration of everything we know about power. Celebrated UC Berkeley psychologist Dr. Dacher Keltner argues that compassion and selflessness enable us to have the most influence over others and the result is power as a force for good in the world.

It is taken for granted that power corrupts. This is reinforced... Read more

Time Travel

By: James Gleick

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Length: 9 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

“A time-jumping, head-tripping odyssey.” —The Millions
“A bracing swim in the waters of science, technology and fiction.” —Washington Post
“A thrilling journey of ideas.” —Boston Globe

From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, here is a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and... Read more

Weapons of Math Destruction

By: Cathy O'Neil

Narrated by: Cathy O'Neil

Length: 6 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A former Wall Street quant sounds the alarm on Big Data and the mathematical models that threaten to rip apart our social fabric—with a new afterword
 
“A manual for the twenty-first-century citizen . . . relevant and urgent.”—Financial Times
 
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The... Read more

Ghostland

By: Colin Dickey

Narrated by: Jon Lindstrom

Length: 10 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

One of NPR’s Great Reads of 2016

“A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories…absorbing…[and] intellectually intriguing.” —The New York Times Book Review

From the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that takes readers on a road trip through some of the country’s most infamously... Read more

One Righteous Man

By: Arthur Browne

Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman

Length: 13 hours

Abridged: No

A history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department’s first black officer.
 
When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as... Read more

Born with Wings

By: Daisy Khan

Narrated by: Daisy Khan

Length: 11 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

The dramatic, spiritual memoir of a prominent Muslim woman working to empower women and girls across the world—for readers of Malala Yousafzai and Azar Nafisi.

Raised in a progressive Muslim family in the shadows of the Himalayan mountains, where she attended a Catholic girls’ school, Daisy experienced culture shock when her family sent her to... Read more

The Platinum Age of Television

By: David Bianculli

Narrated by: David Bianculli

Length: 23 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Television shows have now eclipsed films as the premier form of visual narrative art of our time. This new book by one of our finest critics explains—historically, in depth, and with interviews with the celebrated creators themselves—how the art of must-see/binge-watch television evolved.

Darwin had his theory of evolution, and David Bianculli... Read more

A Burglar's Guide to the City

By: Geoff Manaugh

Narrated by: Scott Aiello

Length: 7 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and tunnel jobs, break-ins and escapes, A Burglar's Guide to the City offers an unexpected blueprint to the criminal possibilities in the world all around us. You'll never see the city the same way again. 

At the core of A Burglar's Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling insight: how any... Read more

Reading Lolita in Tehran

By: Azar Nafisi

Narrated by: Azar Nafisi

Length: 17 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor... Read more

But What If We're Wrong?

By: Chuck Klosterman

Narrated by: Fiona Hardingham & Chuck Klosterman

Length: 10 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams?... Read more

A Murder Over a Girl

By: Ken Corbett

Narrated by: Ken Corbett

Length: 10 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

A psychologist's gripping, troubling, and moving exploration of the brutal murder of a possibly transgender middle school student by an eighth grade classmate

On Feb. 12, 2008, at E. O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, CA, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney shot and killed his classmate, Larry King, who had recently begun to call himself "Leticia" and... Read more

The Awakened Family

By: Shefali Tsabary, Ph.D.

Narrated by: Shefali Tsabary, Ph.D.

Length: 14 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

FINALIST FOR THE BOOKS FOR A BETTER LIFE AWARD • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"Parents . . . you will be wowed and awed by [Dr. Shefali]." —Oprah Winfrey

As seen on Oprah’s SuperSoul Sunday, a radically transformative plan that shows parents how to raise children to be their best, truest selves, from the New York Times bestselling author of The... Read more

A Brief History of Vice

By: Robert Evans

Narrated by: Tristan Morris

Length: 7 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

A celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time, A Brief History of Vice explores a side of the past that mainstream history books prefer to hide. History has never been more fun—or more intoxicating.

Guns, germs, and steel might have transformed us from hunter-gatherers into modern... Read more

Brazillionaires

By: Alex Cuadros

Narrated by: Alex Cuadros

Length: 10 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

For readers of Michael Lewis comes an engrossing tale of a country’s spectacular rise and fall, intertwined with the story of Brazil’s wealthiest citizen, Eike Batista—a universal story of hubris and tragedy that uncovers the deeper meaning of this era of billionaires.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE FINANCIAL TIMES

When Bloomberg... Read more

Bullies

By: Alex Abramovich

Narrated by: Alex Abramovich

Length: 6 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

The powerful account of one writer's unlikely friendship with his childhood bully, now the president of a motorcycle club in one of America's most dangerous cities.

Once upon a time, Alex Abramovich and Trevor Latham were mortal enemies: miniature outlaws in a Long Island elementary school, perpetually at each other's throats. Then they lost... Read more

All the Single Ladies

By: Rebecca Traister

Narrated by: Candace Thaxton

Length: 11 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

* NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2016 SELECTION * BEST BOOKS OF 2016 SELECTION BY THE BOSTON GLOBE * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY * NPR * CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY *

The New York Times bestselling investigation into the sexual, economic, and emotional lives of women is “an informative and thought-provoking book for anyone—not just the single ladies—who... Read more

The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

By: Laura Tillman

Narrated by: Julia Whelan

Length: 6 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

“A haunted, haunting examination of mental illness and murder in a more or less ordinary American city…Mature and thoughtful…A Helter Skelter for our time, though without a hint of sensationalism—unsettling in the extreme but written with confidence and deep empathy” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas—one... Read more

The Red Bandanna

By: Tom Rinaldi

Narrated by: Tom Rinaldi

Length: 6 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

A New York Times bestseller

What would you do in the last hour of your life?
 
The story of Welles Crowther, whose actions on 9/11 offer a lasting lesson on character, calling and courage
  
One Sunday morning before church, when Welles Crowther was a young boy, his father gave him a red handkerchief for his back pocket. Welles kept it with him... Read more

Not Pretty Enough

By: Gerri Hirshey

Narrated by: Eliza Foss

Length: 18 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

A bold and deeply researched biography of a complicated cultural icon

When Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl in 1962, it sold more than two million copies in just three weeks, presaging the self-help boom and helping to usher in the unapologetic self-affirmation of second wave feminism. Brown declared that it was okay, even... Read more

The Content Trap

By: Bharat Anand

Narrated by: Jason Culp

Length: 16 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

“My favorite book of the year.”—Doug McMillon, CEO, Wal-Mart Stores

Harvard Business School Professor of Strategy Bharat Anand presents an incisive new approach to digital transformation that favors fostering connectivity over focusing exclusively on content.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG

Companies everywhere face two major... Read more