Social Science audiobooks

Among Schoolchildren

By: Tracy Kidder

Narrated by: Stephen Yankee

Length: 8 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author's classic, "brilliantly illuminated" account of education in America (The New York Times Book Review). Mrs. Zajac is feisty, funny, and tough. She likes to call herself an "old-lady teacher." (She is thirty-four.) Around Kelly School, she is infamous for her discipline: "She is mean, bro," says one of her... Read more

The Empathy Gap

By: J. D. Trout

Narrated by: J. D. Trout

Length: 9 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Drawing on his sweeping and innovative research, philosopher and cognitive scientist J. D. Trout recruits the latest findings in psychology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience to answer the question: How can we make better personal decisions and design social policies that improve the lives of everyone?We are touched when faced with the... Read more

Elsewhere, U.S.A.

By: Dalton Conley

Narrated by: Christopher Lane

Length: 6 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

Over the past three decades, our daily lives have changed slowly but dramatically. Boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. How many of us now work from home, our wireless economy allowing and encouraging us to work 24/7? How many of us talk to our children while... Read more

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

By: Alain de Botton

Narrated by: David Colacci

Length: 6 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

We spend most of our waking lives at work—in occupations most often chosen by our inexperienced younger selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what our jobs mean to us. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, beautifully exploring what other people wake up to do... Read more

Keep the Change

By: Steve Dublanica

Narrated by: Dan John Miller

Length: 9 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Tipping is huge in America. Almost everyone leaves at least one tip every day. More than five million American workers depend on them, and we spend $66 billion on tips each year. And everyone recognizes that queasy feeling - in bars and restaurants, barbershops and beauty parlors, hotels and strip clubs, and everywhere else - when the check... Read more

Savage Inequalities

By: Jonathan Kozol

Narrated by: Mark Winston

Length: 8 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

For two years, beginning in 1988, Jonathan Kozol visited schools in neighborhoods across the country, from Illinois to Washington D.C., and from New York to San Antonio. He spoke with teachers, principals, superintendents, and, most important, children. What he found was devastating. Not only were schools for rich and poor blatantly unequal, the... Read more

The Media

By: Neal Cortell

Narrated by: Morton Dean

Length: 3 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Veteran television reporter Neal Cortell tackles the subject of in The Media, Journalism in Crisis. With the help of renowned journalists, academics, regulators, and activists, The Media discusses the state of news that America awoke to each day included clearly delineated separation of reporting and editorial opinion, compared to the internet... Read more

The Magic Room

By: Jeffrey Zaslow

Narrated by: Sandra Burr & Jeffrey Zaslow

Length: 10 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

Thousands of women have stepped inside Becker’s Bridal in Fowler, Michigan, to try on their dream dresses in the Magic Room, a special space with soft lighting, a circular pedestal, and mirrors that carry a bride’s reflections into infinity. The women bring with them their most precious expectations about romance, love, fidelity, permanence, and... Read more

Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone

By: Hunter S. Thompson

Narrated by: Phil Gigante

Length: 17 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

“Buy the ticket, take the ride,” was a favorite slogan of Hunter S. Thompson, and it pretty much defined both his work and his life. Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone showcases the roller-coaster of a career at the magazine that was his literary home.Jann S. Wenner, the outlaw journalist’s friend and editor for nearly thirty-five years, has... Read more

The Mansion of Happiness

By: Jill Lepore

Narrated by: Coleen Marlo

Length: 8 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has composed a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave.How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes.... Read more

Silent Tears

By: Kay Bratt

Narrated by: Shannon McManus

Length: 9 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

Irrepressible memories. Vacant eyes. A child being dangled from a third story window. A boy tied to a chair. Children sleeping in layers of clothing to fight off the bitter cold. An infant dying from starvation. Some things your mind will never allow you to forget.Silent Tears is the true story of the adversity and triumphs one woman faced as... Read more

Jeff, One Lonely Guy

By: Jeff Ragsdale, David Shields & Michael Logan

Narrated by: Jeff Ragsdale

Length: 3 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

In October 2011, Jeff Ragsdale, a down-and-out actor and stand-up comedian, posted a flyer around Lower Manhattan, asking people to call him if they wanted to talk. He thought he’d get a dozen calls; instead, he got hundreds, then thousands once pictures of the flyer went viral on the net. They came from all over the country and from as far away... Read more

Why Have Kids?

By: Jessica Valenti

Narrated by: Emily Beresford

Length: 5 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

A provocative and intimate exploration of modern parenthood from a writer named “a gutsy young third-wave feminist” by the New York Times.If parenting is making Americans unhappy, if it’s impossible to “have it all,” if people don’t have the economic, social, or political structures needed to support parenting, then why do it?In Why Have Kids?,... Read more

Smoke Signals

By: Martin A. Lee

Narrated by: Nick Podehl

Length: 21 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

Martin A. Lee traces the dramatic social history of marijuana from its origins to its emergence in the 1960s as a defining force in a culture war that has never ceased. Lee describes how the illicit marijuana subculture overcame government opposition and morphed into a dynamic, multibillion-dollar industry.In 1996, California voters approved... Read more

He-Motions

By: T. D. Jakes

Narrated by: Richard Allen

Length: 12 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Do you find it difficult to express how you feel and what you need in your personal relationships?
Do you have trouble communicating and developing relationships with other men?
Does the weight of responsibility drag you down?
Do you wonder why it seems difficult to get the support and encouragement you need from your wife?
Do you often feel that... Read more

The End of Men

By: Hanna Rosin

Narrated by: Laural Merlington

Length: 9 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Men have been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. And yet, as journalist Hanna Rosin discovered, that long-held truth is no longer true. At this unprecedented moment, women are no longer merely gaining on men; they have pulled decisively ahead by almost every measure. Already “the end of men” — the phrase Rosin coined — has... Read more

Bully

By: Lee Hirsch & Cynthia Lowen

Narrated by: Mel Foster

Length: 8 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

PRAISE FOR THE FILM:
“An insightful and moving documentary.” —USA Today“Moving and touching…Bully forces you to confront…the extent to which cruelty is embedded in our schools and therefore in our society as a whole.” —New York Times, Critics’ PickABOUT THIS AUDIOBOOK:
A companion to the acclaimed film Bully, this audiobook brings the story of the... Read more

Searching for Zion

By: Emily Raboteau

Narrated by: Quincy Tyler Bernstine

Length: 10 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

Emily Raboteau’s Searching for Zion takes listeners around the world on an unexpected adventure of faith. Both one woman’s quest for a place to call “home” and an investigation into a people’s search for the Promised Land, this landmark work is a trenchant inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement. At twenty-three, Raboteau... Read more

Of Dice and Men

By: David M. Ewalt

Narrated by: David M. Ewalt & Mikael Naramore

Length: 8 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

The Hobbit meets Moneyball in this definitive book on Dungeons & Dragons—from its origins and rise to cultural prominence to the continued effects on popular culture today. HERE, THERE BE DRAGONS.Ancient red dragons with 527 hit points, +44 to attack, and a 20d10 breath weapon, to be specific. In the world of fantasy role-playing, those... Read more

Smarter Than You Think

By: Clive Thompson

Narrated by: Jeff Cummings

Length: 10 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

How technology boosts our cognitive abilities—making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever beforeIt’s undeniable: technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson votes yes. The Internet age has produced a radical new style of human intelligence, worthy of both... Read more

Slimed!

By: Mathew Klickstein

Narrated by: Nick Podehl

Length: 8 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

An Entertainment Weekly Best Tell-All of 2013!One of Parade Magazine's Best Books About Movies/TV of 2013!The behind the scenes story of the network that shaped a generationSlimed! is the first oral history to chronicle the surprisingly complex, wonderfully nostalgic, and impressively compelling story of Nickelodeon, the first kids’ network.... Read more

Face Value

By: Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

Narrated by: Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

Length: 9 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

A thought-provoking examination of how we think and talk about beauty today—and the unexpected and often positive ways that beauty shapes our lives.For decades, we’ve discussed our insecurities in the face of idealized, retouched, impossibly perfect images. We’ve worried primping and preening are a distraction and a trap. But have we focused too... Read more

Suspicion Nation

By: Lisa Bloom

Narrated by: Lisa Bloom

Length: 8 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

A provocative examination of race, gun laws, and violence that exposes how the state of Florida bungled the Trayvon Martin case through new interviews and revelations about the trial.Many thought the election of our first African-American president put an end to the conversation about race in this country, and that America had moved into a... Read more

The Locust Effect

By: Gary A. Haugen & Victor Boutros

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Length: 12 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

While the world has made encouraging strides in the fight against global poverty, there is a hidden crisis silently undermining our best efforts to help the poor.It is a plague of everyday violence.Beneath the surface of the world’s poorest communities, common violence—like rape, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, police abuse and... Read more