Social Science audiobooks

The Taste for Civilization

By: Janet A. Flammang

Narrated by: Pam Ward

Length: 12 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

From table talk to farmers' markets, analyzing the cultural politics of what and how we eatThis audiobook explores the idea that table activities - the mealtime rituals of food preparation, serving, and dining - lay the foundation for a proper education on the value of civility, the importance of the common good, and what it means to be a good... Read more

In Deep Water

By: Peter Lehner

Narrated by: Tom Weiner

Length: 4 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Deepwater Horizon was supposed to be the cutting edge of energy exploration: drilling five thousand feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, the $560 million rig would be indispensable in helping to solve the ongoing energy crisis.Then, on April 20, 2010, BP’s dismal safety record came home to roost. An explosion followed by a massive... 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

The Fiery Trial

By: Eric Foner

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

Length: 18 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

In this landmark work of deep scholarship and insight, Eric Foner gives us the definitive history of Abraham Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. Foner begins with Lincoln's youth in Indiana and Illinois and follows the trajectory of his career across an increasingly tense and shifting political terrain from Illinois to Washington, D.C.... Read more

American Colossus

By: H. W. Brands

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 23 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

In a grand-scale narrative history, the bestselling author of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize now captures the decades when capitalism was at its most unbridled and a few breathtakingly wealthy businessmen utterly transformed America from an agrarian economy to a world power.

The years between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth... Read more

The Souls of Black Folk

By: W. E. B. Du Bois

Narrated by: Mirron Willis

Length: 8 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," writes Du Bois, in one of the most prophetic works in all of American literature.First published in 1903, this collection of fifteen essays dared to describe the racism that prevailed at that time in America—and to demand an end to it. Du Bois' writing draws on his early... Read more

Religious Diversity

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Paul Solman talks with author Robert Putnam about his new book American Grace, which delves into the role of religion in the United States. Read more

The Deeds of My Fathers

By: Paul David Pope

Narrated by: Keith Szarabajka

Length: 11 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

A story that reads like The Godfather has been crossed with Citizen Kane. The Deeds of My Fathers is the riveting true story of two men, a father and a son, who each started with nothing and built an empire.Generoso Pope, Sr., an Italian immigrant, arrived in New York in 1906 with only pennies in his pocket. He got a job shoveling sand, but... Read more

Mysterious Sightings In the Sky

By: Jacques Vallee, Ph.D.

Narrated by: Michael Toms

Length: 57 minutes

Abridged: No

During the past century, individuals, newspapers, and military agencies have recorded thousands of UFO incidents, giving rise to much speculation about flying saucers, visitors from other planets, and alien abductions. But the extraterrestrial phenomenon did not begin in the present era. The first case reported turns out to be in the 1500s B.C.... Read more

The Dead Beat

By: Marilyn Johnson

Narrated by: Marilyn Johnson

Length: 6 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

Marilyn Johnson was enthralled by the remarkable lives that were marching out of this world—so she sought out the best obits in the English language and the people who spent their lives writing about the dead. She surveyed the darkest corners of Internet chat rooms, and made a pilgrimage to London to savor the most caustic and literate obits of... Read more

The Killer of Little Shepherds

By: Douglas Starr

Narrated by: Erik Davies

Length: 12 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

A riveting true crime story that vividly recounts the birth of modern forensics.

At the end of the nineteenth century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher, known and feared as “The Killer of Little Shepherds,” terrorized the French countryside. He eluded authorities for years—until he ran up against prosecutor Emile Fourquet and Dr. Alexandre... Read more

The Moral Landscape

By: Sam Harris

Narrated by: Sam Harris

Length: 6 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

New York Times bestselling author Sam Harris’s first book, The End of Faith, ignited a worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In the aftermath, Harris discovered that most people—from religious fundamentalists to non-believing scientists—agree on one point: science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. Indeed, our failure... Read more

Black Migration From the Jim Crow South

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 8 minutes

Abridged: No

In her new book The Warmth of Other Suns, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and professor Isabel Wilkerson digs into the 'The Great Migration' that took place from 1915 to 1970, when 6 million African-Americans left the South to go north and west in search of a better life. Jeffrey Brown speaks with the author. Read more

The Grace of Silence

By: Michele Norris

Narrated by: Michele Norris

Length: 5 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

In the wake of talk of a “postracial” America upon Barack Obama’s ascension as president of the United States, Michele Norris, cohost of National Public Radio’s flagship program All Things Considered, set out to write, through original reporting, a book about “the hidden conversation” on race that is unfolding nationwide. She would, she thought,... Read more

To You We Shall Return

By: Joseph M. Marshall III

Narrated by: Joseph M. Marshall III

Length: 4 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

“Grandmother, you who listen and hear all, you from whom all good things come…It is your embrace we feel when we return to you.”This traditional Lakota prayer to Grandmother Earth opens Joseph Marshall III’s newest work, a meditation on our connection to the land and an exhortation to respect it. Using a combination of personal anecdote,... Read more

The Lost Dogs

By: Jim Gorant

Narrated by: Richard Powers

Length: 10 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

This is an inspiring story of survival and our powerful bond with man’s best friend in the aftermath of the nation’s most notorious case of animal cruelty.Animal lovers and sports fans were shocked when the story broke about NFL player Michael Vick’s brutal dogfighting operation. But what became of the dozens of dogs who survived? As acclaimed... Read more

The Coke Machine

By: Michael Blanding

Narrated by: George K. Wilson

Length: 12 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

Ever since its "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" commercials from the 1970s, Coca-Cola has billed itself as the world's beverage, uniting all colors and cultures in a mutual love of its caramel-sweet sugar water. The formula has worked incredibly well, making it one of the most profitable companies on the planet and Coca-Cola the world's... Read more

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works

By: Nick Bilton

Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain

Length: 7 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

Are we driving off a digital cliff and heading for disaster, unable to focus, maintain concentration, or form the human bonds that make life worth living? Are media and business doomed and about to be replaced by amateur hour?

The world, as Nick Bilton—with tongue-in-cheek—shows, has been going to hell for a long, long time, and what we are... Read more

Composing a Further Life

By: Mary Catherine Bateson

Narrated by: Sevanne Kassarjian

Length: 10 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

Mary Catherine Bateson sees aging today as an "improvisational art form calling for imagination and willingness to learn," and in this ardent, affirming study, she relates the experiences of men and women—herself included—who, upon entering this second adulthood, have found new meaning and new ways to contribute, composing their lives in new... Read more

Has Religious Tolerance Changed in America?

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 15 minutes

Abridged: No

NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown moderates a conversation among four religious leaders and experts on the tolerance-or intolerance-of different religions and cultures in America, nine years after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Read more

Fury

By: Koren Zailckas

Narrated by: Koren Zailckas

Length: 10 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

The author of the iconic New York Times bestseller Smashed undertakes a quest to confront her own anger.

In the years following the publication of her landmark memoir, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Koren Zailc Read more

True Prep - Abridged

By: Lisa Birnbach & Chip Kidd

Narrated by: Lisa Birnbach

Length: 2 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: Yes

“Wake up, Muffy. We’re back.”

From Lisa Birnbach, the author of The Official Preppy Handbook—and designer Chip Kidd—comes a whole new take on the prep world that Birnbach turned into an international best-selling phenomenon thirty years ago.

True Prep is a contemporary look at how the old guard of natural-fiber-loving, dog-worshipping,... Read more

The Genial Gene

By: Joan Roughgarden

Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie

Length: 8 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

Are selfishness and individuality - rather than kindness and cooperation - basic to biological nature? Does a "selfish gene" create universial sexual conflict? In The Genial Gene, Joan Roughgarden forcefully rejects these and other ideas that have come to dominate the study of animal evolution. Building on her brilliant and innovative book... 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