Social Science audiobooks

Forgotten Continent

By: Michael Reid

Narrated by: Gary Dikeos

Length: 18 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

Latin America has often been condemned to failure. Neither poor enough to evoke Africa's moral crusade nor as explosively booming as India and China, it has largely been overlooked by the West. Yet this vast continent, home to half a billion people, the world's largest reserves of arable land, and 8.5 percent of global oil, is busily... Read more

In Defense of Women

By: H. L. Mencken

Narrated by: Fred Williams

Length: 5 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Originally published in 1918, this book considers topics that remain of vital interest to today’s readers, including monogamy and polygamy, the double standard, sexual harassment, and declining marriage rates. Written in Mencken’s characteristic no-nonsense manner, In Defense of Women crackles with controversy and caustic wit.“The truth is that... Read more

What Women Want

By: Paco Underhill

Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain

Length: 7 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

Paco Underhill, the author of the hugely successful Why We Buy and Call of the Mall, reports on the growing importance of women in everybody’s marketplace—what makes a package, product, space, or service “female friendly.” Underhill offers a tour of the world’s marketplace—with shrewd observations and practical applications to help everybody... Read more

It Gets Better

By: Dan Savage & Terry Miller

Narrated by: Richard Powers & Marguerite Gavin

Length: 9 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

Every story can change a life.Growing up isn’t easy. Many young people face daily tormenting and bullying, making them feel like they have nowhere to turn. This is especially true for LGBT kids and teens who often hide their sexuality for fear of being bullied. Without other openly gay adults and mentors in their lives, they can’t imagine what... Read more

Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed

By: Howard Gardner

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 7 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

The True, the Good, and the Beautiful are as timeless a trio of concepts as Western culture has to offer. Since before Socrates, humankind has explored these virtues in an attempt to describe and categorize them. Our definitions of these concepts, moreover, have unceasingly changed over the ages and across continents. Every known civilization... Read more

Walk Out Walk On

By: Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze

Narrated by: Deborah Frieze

Length: 7 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

This is an era of increasingly complex problems, fewer and fewer resources to address them, and failing solutions. Is it possible to find viable solutions to the challenges we face today as individuals, communities, and nations? This inspiring book takes readers on a learning journey to seven communities around the world to meet people who have... Read more

Walk Out Walk On

By: Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze

Narrated by: Deborah Frieze

Length: 7 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Bestselling author Margaret Wheatley and long-time Berkana Institute collaborator Deborah Frieze take readers on a learning journey into seven diverse communities that have walked out of limiting beliefs and practices and walked on to something new. From Brazil to Ohio, they demonstrate how each of these communities made a conscious choice to... 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

Join the Club

By: Tina Rosenberg

Narrated by: Dana Green

Length: 16 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

In the style of The Tipping Point or Freakonomics, a groundbreaking book that will change the way you look at the world.

The fearless Tina Rosenberg has spent her career tackling some of the world's hardest problems. The Haunted Land, her searing work on how Eastern Europe faced the crimes of Communism, garnered both the National Book Award and... Read more

Everything Is Obvious

By: Duncan J. Watts

Narrated by: Duncan J. Watts

Length: 8 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

By understanding how and when common sense fails, we can improve our understanding of the present and better plan for the future. 

Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more... Read more

Herland

By: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Narrated by: William Dufris

Length: 7 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, first published in 1915, is a feminist utopian novel that describes an isolated society composed entirely of women—a progressive, environmentally conscious land where peace and rationality reign and poverty is unknown. Told from the perspective of Vandyk Jennings, a male sociology student who sets out with his... Read more

The Great Shame

By: Thomas Keneally

Narrated by: John McDonough

Length: 35 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

Thomas Keneally, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's List, is universally praised for crafting smooth narratives from authentic historical events. With The Great Shame, he turns his insightful eye toward the Irish struggle through the nineteenth century. In sharp contrast to much of Europe, Ireland was a terrible place to be during... Read more

Idiot America

By: Charles P. Pierce

Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot

Length: 9 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

The culture wars are over and the idiots have won. This is a veteran journalist's caustically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States.The three Great Premises of Idiot America:– Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units. – Anything can be true if someone... Read more

Economic Paths Diverged Over 30 Years

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 9 minutes

Abridged: No

As part of his series on Making Sen$e of financial news, economics correspondent Paul Solman reports from two Ohio counties -- Crawford and Delaware -- that had similar incomes 30 years ago, but their economies and populations have since taken very different paths. Read more

Citadels of Power: Castles in History and Archaeology

By: Thomas Finan

Narrated by: Thomas Finan

Length: 7 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

Professor Thomas J. Finan conducts an enthralling series of lectures on a subject that is an enduring part of the popular imagination: the castle. Professor Finan examines the castle from a variety of contemporary perspectives, including those of history, archaeology, geography, and landscape studies. The course also covers the morphology of... Read more

The Social Animal

By: David Brooks

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Length: 16 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a... Read more

Las crónicas de Jackson Heights

By: Orlando Tobon

Narrated by: Jorge Pupo

Length: 5 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

El padrino de Jackson Heights hace mucho mas que arreglos de viajes desde su diminuta agencia escondida en un rincon del sector de Queens conocido como la Pequena Colombia de Nueva York. Con frecuencia Fernando Padron es la unica mano amiga para miles de inmigrantes latinos. Entre sus diversos oficios estan el de contador, buscador de empleos,... Read more

West End Girls - Abridged

By: Barbara Tate

Narrated by: Kate O'Sullivan

Length: 6 hours

Abridged: Yes

Now a Top Ten bestseller. Barbara Tate was 17 when she heard the whispered word that would change her life: Soho. It would take four years for Barbara to escape her loveless home but when she finally made it to the forbidden streets of Soho - just as London was recovering from the trauma of the second world war - things would never be the same... Read more

The Information

By: James Gleick

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Length: 16 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
 
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our... Read more

On Gold Mountain

By: Lisa See

Narrated by: Kate Reading

Length: 18 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

From the bestselling author of The Island of Sea Women, here is the true story of the one-hundred-year-odyssey of the author’s Chinese-American family, combining years of research with “fascinating family anecdotes, imaginative details, and the historical details of immigrant life” (Amy Tan, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club).

"As... Read more

The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women

By: Barbara Seaman

Narrated by: Barbara Caruso

Length: 7 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

For over 40 years Barbara Seaman has been a leading women's health advocate. Now she blows the lid off the estrogen industry in this fascinating book that holds the power to improve-possibly even save-women's lives. In America 30 million women take estrogen. Seaman shows that this powerful hormone is hardly the cure-all some claim it is. In... Read more

Quirk

By: Hannah Holmes

Narrated by: Susan Denaker

Length: 10 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Who are you? It’s the most fundamental of human questions. Are you the type of person who tilts at windmills, or the one who prefers to view them from the comfort of an air-conditioned motorcoach? Our personalities are endlessly fascinating—not just to ourselves but also to our spouses, our parents, our children, our co-workers, our neighbors.... 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

I Beat the Odds

By: Michael Oher

Narrated by: Michael Boatman

Length: 6 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

The football star made famous in the hit film The Blind Side reflects on how far he has come from the circumstances of his youth.

Michael Oher is the young man at the center of the true story depicted in The Blind Side movie (and book) that swept up awards and accolades. Though the odds were heavily stacked against him, Michael had a burning... Read more