Social Science audiobooks

Taylor Branch and Shukree Hassan Tilghman

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Fifty years after the March on Washington, African-Americans still confront high rates of unemployment, segregation in education and race-based partisan gridlock. In what areas have we seen progress? Gwen Ifill discusses the advances and what's left to be done with historian Taylor Branch and filmmaker Shukree Hassan Tilghman. Read more

Buck

By: MK Asante

Narrated by: MK Asante & Adenrele Ojo

Length: 5 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

A rebellious boy’s journey through the wilds of urban America and the shrapnel of a self-destructing family—this is the riveting story of a generation told through one dazzlingly poetic new voice.
 
MK Asante was born in Zimbabwe to American parents: a mother who led the new nation’s dance company and a father who would soon become a revered... 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

Down in the Chapel

By: Joshua Dubler

Narrated by: Rodney Gardiner

Length: 14 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

A bold and provocative interpretation of one of the most religiously vibrant places in America—a state penitentiaryBaraka, Al, Teddy, and Sayyid—four black men from South Philadelphia, two Christian and two Muslim—are serving life at Pennsylvania's maximum-security Graterford Prison. All of them work in Graterford's chapel, a place that is at... Read more

Seniors Hold on to Urban Independence Into Old Age

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 8 minutes

Abridged: No

A new community model lets seniors enjoy all of the security and social amenities of a retirement community without leaving their homes. The alternative is called "aging in place." Ray Suarez reports on how this village concept may help seniors retain their independence into their golden years. Read more

The End the Suburbs

By: Leigh Gallagher

Narrated by: Jessica Geffen

Length: 7 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

“The government in the past created one American Dream at the expense of almost all others: the dream of a house, a lawn, a picket fence, two children, and a car. But there is no single American Dream anymore.”

For nearly 70 years, the suburbs were as American as apple pie. As the middle class ballooned and single-family homes and cars became... Read more

Turn Around Bright Eyes

By: Rob Sheffield

Narrated by: Rob Sheffield

Length: 6 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

Once upon a time I was falling apart. Now I'm always falling in love.Pick up the microphone.When Rob Sheffield moved to New York City in the summer of 2001, he was a young widower trying to start a new life in a new town. Behind, in the past, was his life as a happily married rock critic, with a wife he adored, and a massive collection of mix... Read more

White Americans Feel Ceiling Effect

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 6 minutes

Abridged: No

While White Americans Feel ‘Ceiling Effect,’ Blacks and Latinos Find AspirationA new study shows that since 2006 whites have grown more pessimistic about their economic outlook while African-Americans and Latinos have grown more optimistic. Ray Suarez talks with Matt Barreto of Latino Decisions and Ellis Cose, author of The End of Anger to... Read more

Gov. Markell: Hiring More People With Disabilities

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 6 minutes

Abridged: No

A new report from the National Governor's Association says states should do more to employ the 54 million Americans living with a disability, among whom only 20 percent are currently employed or looking for a job. Judy Woodruff interviews Delaware Gov. Jack Markell about his push to boost accessibility to the labor market. Read more

The Seven Paths

By: Jim Ferrell

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Too many people today have taken the wrong path. They walk alone, seeking peace and fulfillment in isolation. Countless well-meaning self-help books preach this gospel, as the name “self-help” implies. But this approach will take us only so far. Ultimately, it is in communion with our fellow beings and the natural world that we are made whole.... Read more

The Trials of Laura Fair

By: Carole Haber

Narrated by: Pam Ward

Length: 10 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

On November 3, 1870, on a San Francisco ferry, Laura Fair shot and killed her married lover, A. P. Crittenden. Throughout her two murder trials, Fair’s lawyers, supported by expert testimony from physicians, claimed that the shooting was the result of temporary insanity caused by a severely painful menstrual cycle. The first jury disregarded... Read more

After Trayvon

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 11 minutes

Abridged: No

The killing of Trayvon Martin provoked candid reflection from President Obama on the subject of discrimination and American race relations. PBS NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown, Nathan McCall, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Bishop Harry Jackson Jr. and Michael Melton continue the conversation on life and perception for black men in the U.S. Read more

New Report Reveals Where You Live and Work Affects Your Economic Mobility

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Children of low-income families in certain communities are more likely to move up the economic ladder than others, says a new report by Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley. Jeffrey Brown talks to co-author Raj Chetty, Harvard professor of economics, for more on their portrait of American social mobility. Read more

Los Angeles Killing Fields

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Los Angeles has turned former urban battlegrounds into common grounds for communities in an effort to stomp out gun violence. What looks like a regular block party is a program that brings gang members, police officers and other neighbors together. Ray Suarez examines how the Summer Night Lights event is making the city safer. Read more

Destined to Witness

By: Hans Massaquoi

Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez

Length: 19 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

What would life be like for a black boy growing up in Nazi Germany? This unprecedented autobiography answers that question with the spellbinding true story of Hans J. Massaquoi's life in Hamburg during the height of Hitler's regime. Hans is the son of a black Liberian diplomat father and a white German mother. His father returns to Africa at the... Read more

Who Owns the Future?

By: Jaron Lanier

Narrated by: Pete Simonelli

Length: 12 hours

Abridged: No

The “brilliant” and “daringly original” (The New York Times) critique of digital networks from the “David Foster Wallace of tech” (London Evening Standard)—asserting that to fix our economy, we must fix our information economy.

Jaron Lanier is the father of virtual reality and one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers. Who Owns the Future? is... Read more

This Town

By: Mark Leibovich

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

Length: 12 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the nation's most acclaimed journalists, the New York Times' Mark Leibovich, presents a blistering, penetrating, controversial--and often hysterical--look at Washington's incestuous "media industrial complex." Read more

Pilgrim's Wilderness

By: Tom Kizzia

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

Length: 10 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Into the Wild meets Helter Skelter in this riveting true story of a modern-day homesteading family in the deepest reaches of the Alaskan wilderness – and of the chilling secrets of its maniacal, spellbinding patriarch.
 
When Papa Pilgrim appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy with his wife and fifteen children in tow, his new... Read more

The Kid

By: Dan Savage

Narrated by: Dan Savage

Length: 7 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

Dan Savage's nationally syndicated sex advice column, "Savage Love," enrages and excites more than four million people each week. In The Kid, Savage tells a no-holds-barred, high-energy story of an ordinary American couple who wants to have a baby. Except that in this case the couple happens to be Dan and his boyfriend. That fact, in the face of... Read more

Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble

By: Nora Ephron

Narrated by: Kathe Mazur

Length: 12 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

Two classic collections of Nora Ephron’s uproarious essays—tackling everything from feminism to the media, from politics to beauty products, with her inimitable charm and distinctive wit—now available in one audiobook. 
 
This edition brings together some of Ephron’s most famous writing on a generation of women (and men) who helped shape the way... Read more

I Wear the Black Hat

By: Chuck Klosterman

Narrated by: Chuck Klosterman

Length: 7 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

One-of-a-kind cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman “offers up great facts, interesting cultural insights, and thought-provoking moral calculations in this look at our love affair with the anti-hero” (New York magazine).

Chuck Klosterman, “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine, has walked into the... Read more

Lost Girls

By: Robert Kolker

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

Length: 11 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

New York Times Bestseller • Now a Netflix FilmThe bestselling account of the lives of five young women whose fates converged in the perplexing case of the Long Island Serial Killer.“Rich, tragic...monumental...true-crime reporting at its best.”—Washington Post
One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert—after running through the oceanfront... Read more

Exploring the Psychology of Wealth, ‘Pernicious’ Effects of Economic Inequality

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 8 minutes

Abridged: No

It's been said that money is the root of all evil. Does money make people more likely to lie, cheat and steal? Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports on new research from the University of California, Berkeley about how wealth and inequality affects us psychologically. Read more

Prosperity, Compassion and Happiness

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Usually, as a country's GDP goes up, that nation's well-being tends to rise as well. But for the last 35 years, as GDP has grown in the United States, Americans' average happiness hasn't increased. Economics correspondent Paul Solman talks to researchers about how they study the connection between money and happiness. Read more