Social Science audiobooks

The Richer Sex

By: Liza Mundy

Narrated by: Coleen Marlo

Length: 8 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

A revolution is under way. Within a generation, more households will be supported by women than by men. In The Richer Sex, Liza Mundy shows how this reality will transform the sexual, dating, marriage, and work habits of men and women worldwide.

This flip in the economic order is inevitable, and Mundy demonstrates why it will also be a good thing... Read more

What Teachers Make

By: Taylor Mali

Narrated by: Adam Verner

Length: 2 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

Former middle-school teacher and teachers' advocate Taylor Mali struck a chord with his passionate response to a man at a dinner party who asked him what kind of salary teachers make—a poetic rant that has been seen and forwarded millions of times on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Based on the poem that inspired a movement, What Teachers Make is... Read more

In Our Prime

By: Patricia Cohen

Narrated by: Pam Ward

Length: 10 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

From the New York Times reporter whose beat is culture and ideas
comes a fascinating, revelatory, and timely social history of the
concept of middle age. For the first time ever, the middle-aged make up
the biggest, richest, and most influential segment of the country, yet
the history of middle age has remained largely untold. This important
and... Read more

Gossip

By: Joseph Epstein

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Length: 7 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

To his successful examinations of some of the most powerful forces in
modern life—envy, ambition, snobbery, friendship—the keen observer
and critic Joseph Epstein now adds Gossip. No trivial matter,
despite its reputation, gossip, he argues, is an eternal and necessary
human enterprise. Proving that he himself is a master of the art,
Epstein... Read more

The Spirit Level

By: Kate Pickett & Richard Wilkinson

Narrated by: Clive Chafer

Length: 8 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

It is a well-established fact that in rich societies the poor
have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. The Spirit Level,
based on thirty years of research, takes this truth a step further. One
common factor links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree
of equality among their members. Further, more unequal... Read more

The Dumbest Generation

By: Mark Bauerlein

Narrated by: Danny Campbell

Length: 9 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

Let's take stock of young America. Compared to previous generations, American youth have more schooling (college enrollments have never been higher); more money ($100 a week in disposable income); more leisure time (five hours a day); and more news and information (Internet, The Daily Show, RSS feeds).



What do they do with all that time and... Read more

Triumph of the City

By: Edward Glaeser

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 12 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the three percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly. Or are they?



As Edward Glaeser proves in this myth-shattering book, cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and... Read more

Never Say Die

By: Susan Jacoby

Narrated by: Laural Merlington

Length: 13 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

In a narrative that combines the intensely personal with social, economic, and historical analysis, Susan Jacoby turns an unsparing eye on the marketers of longevity—pharmaceutical companies, lifestyle gurus, and scientific businessmen who suggest that there will soon be a "cure" for the "disease" of aging. She separates wishful hype from... Read more

Disintegration

By: Eugene Robinson

Narrated by: Alan Bomar Jones

Length: 7 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

The African American population in the United States has always been seen as a single entity: a "Black America" with unified interests and needs. In his groundbreaking book Disintegration, longtime Washington Post journalist Eugene Robinson argues that, through decades of desegregation, affirmative action, and immigration, the concept of Black... Read more

Third World America

By: Arianna Huffington

Narrated by: Coleen Marlo

Length: 6 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

It's not an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species and that the American Dream of a secure, comfortable standard of living has become as outdated as an Edsel with an eight-track player—that the United States of America is in danger of becoming a third world nation.



The evidence is all around us: Our industrial... Read more

Interstate 69

By: Matt Dellinger

Narrated by: Robert Fass

Length: 12 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

New Yorker contributor and decade-long staffer Matt Dellinger uses the controversy surrounding Interstate 69 as a lens through which to examine middle America's current political, social, and economic landscape, including hot-button issues like NAFTA and the country's troubled infrastructure. If completed, I-69 will stretch from Canada to Mexico... Read more

Wrong

By: David H. Freedman

Narrated by: George K. Wilson

Length: 10 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Our investmeents are devastated, obesity is epidemic, blue-chip companies circle the drain, and popular medications turn out to be ineffective and even dangerous. What happened? Didn't we listen to the scientists, economists, and other experts who promised us that if we followed their advice all would be well?



Actually, those experts are a big... Read more

The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics

By: James Kakalios

Narrated by: Peter Berkrot

Length: 9 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

In the pulp magazines and comics of the 1950s, it was predicted that the future would be one of gleaming utopias, with flying cars, jetpacks, and robotic personal assistants. Obviously, things didn't turn out that way. But the world we do have is actually more fantastic than the most outlandish predictions of the science fiction of the... Read more

Pandora's Seed

By: Spencer Wells

Narrated by: Spencer Wells

Length: 6 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

This new book by Spencer Wells, the internationally known geneticist, anthropologist, author, and director of the Genographic Project, focuses on the seminal event in human history: mankind's decision to become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers.



What do terrorism, pandemic disease, and global warming have in common? To find the answer we need... Read more

The Pickup Artist

By: Mystery

Narrated by: Alan Sklar

Length: 9 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

The Pickup Artist is a salacious book about the continuing adventures of the world's most famous pickup artist, Mystery, who was first introduced as the ringleader of a subculture of pickup artists chronicled in Neil Strauss's 2005 bestseller The Game. After fame, fortune, and reality television, a group of pickup artists live in a gorgeous... Read more

Why Women Have Sex

By: David M. Buss & Cindy M. Meston

Narrated by: Renée Raudman

Length: 11 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Do women have sex simply to reproduce or display their affection? When Cindy M. Meston, a clinical psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss joined forces to investigate the underlying sexual motivations of women, what they found astonished them.



Through the voices of real women, Meston and... Read more

Hella Nation

By: Evan Wright

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

Length: 14 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

From his work as a reporter at Hustler magazine to his National Magazine Award—winning writing for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, Evan Wright has always had an affinity for outsiders—what he calls "the lost tribes of America." The previously published pieces in this collection chart a deeply personal journey, beginning with his stark but... Read more

Create Your Own Economy

By: Tyler Cowen

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 7 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

How will we live well in a super-networked, information-soaked, yet predictably irrational world? The only way to know is to understand how the way we think is changing.



As economist Tyler Cowen boldly shows in Create Your Own Economy, the way we think now is changing more rapidly than it has in a very long time. Not since the Industrial... Read more

Snark

By: David Denby

Narrated by: William Dufris

Length: 4 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

What is snark? You recognize it when you see it—a tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true. Snark attempts to steal someone's mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her... Read more

Factory Girls

By: Leslie T. Chang

Narrated by: Susan Ericksen

Length: 14 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly... Read more

The American Way of War

By: Eugene Jarecki

Narrated by: David Drummond

Length: 12 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

In his famous farewell address in 1961, President Eisenhower urgently warned Americans to guard against the "disastrous rise of misplaced power" in the leviathan he dubbed the military-industrial complex. As Eugene Jarecki powerfully portrays in this piercing and necessary book, Eisenhower's worst fears have been realized. The complex has grown... Read more

A Bound Man

By: Shelby Steele

Narrated by: Richard Allen

Length: 3 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

From the New York Times bestselling and controversial author Shelby Steele comes an illuminating examination of the complex racial issues that confront presidential candidate Barack Obama in his race for the White House, a quest that will be one of those galvanizing occasions that forces a national dialogue on the current state of race relations... Read more

Carpe Diem

By: Harry Mount

Narrated by: Stephen Hoye

Length: 5 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

In this lighthearted guided tour of Latin, journalist and former Latin tutor Harry Mount breathes life back into the greatest language of all, drawing on everything from a Monty Python grammar lesson to Angelina Jolie's tattoos. Filled with fascinating tidbits and humorous asides, Carpe Diem will delight the word lovers who made Eats, Shoots and... Read more

Way Off the Road

By: Bill Geist

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 7 hours

Abridged: No

Celebrated roving correspondent for CBS News Sunday Morning and bestselling author Bill Geist serves up a rollicking look at some small-town Americans and their offbeat ways of life.



"In rural Kansas, I asked our motel desk clerk for the name of the best restaurant in the area. After mulling it over, he answered: 'I'd have to say the Texaco, 'cuz... Read more