Social Science audiobooks

Saving Five

By: Amanda Nguyen

Narrated by: Sura Siu

Length: 6 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

This program is read by read by Sura Siu with an exclusive note written and read by the author.

One of TIME and Oprah Daily's Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“Siu's measured, compassionate delivery honors Nguyen's story, which balances the raw emotion of trauma with the strength of survival.”—AudioFile

"Amanda’s story—innovatively told by versions... Read more

It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful

By: Jack Lowery

Narrated by: Vikas Adam

Length: 14 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

The story of art collective Gran Fury—which fought back during the AIDS crisis through direct action and community-made propaganda—offers lessons in love and grief.

In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out... Read more

Vanishing Treasures

By: Katherine Rundell

Narrated by: Lenny Henry & Katherine Rundell

Length: 3 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

A Most Anticipated Book from Boston Globe, Parade, & Literary Hub • From the award-winning author Katherine Rundell comes a “rare and magical book” (Bill Bryson) reckoning with the vanishing wonders of our natural world

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous, and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this brilliant and... Read more

Factfulness

By: Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling & Anna Rosling Ronnlund

Narrated by: Richard Harries

Length: 8 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

For fans of Freakonomics and Thinking, Fast and Slow, here is a book by Hans Rosling, the scientist called "a true inspiration" by Bill Gates, that teaches us how to see the world as it truly is. Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global... Read more

Hillbilly Elegy

By: J. D. Vance

Narrated by: J. D. Vance

Length: 6 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story...From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's... Read more

Transland

By: Mx. Sly

Narrated by: Sebastian Marziali

Length: 8 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

A memoir of transformation and self-discovery that explores fetish communities from a gender diverse perspective. Transland is a fiery and revealing memoir that delves into what happens when a non-binary person goes looking for self-worth and a sense of belonging in fetish subculture, only to find that fetish communities come with just as... Read more

Crypt

By: Alice Roberts

Narrated by: Alice Roberts

Length: 9 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

THE SUNDAY TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER
CHOSEN BY WATERSTONES AS ONE OF THEIR BEST HISTORY BOOKS OF 2024

'Compulsive . . . A wonderful display of how modern archaeology can bring hidden histories to life' Daily Telegraph 

'Gripping . . . I found it hard to put down' Evening Standard

'Another really good book from archaeologist Alice Roberts . . . Helps... Read more

Stolen Focus

By: Johann Hari

Narrated by: Johann Hari

Length: 10 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening—and how to get our attention back.

“The book the world needs in order to win the war on distraction.”—Adam Grant, author of Think Again

“Read this book to... Read more

Everything Must Go

By: Dorian Lynskey

Narrated by: Dorian Lynskey

Length: 14 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

A rich, captivating, and darkly humorous look into the evolution of apocalyptic thought, exploring how film and literature interact with developments in science, politics, and culture, and what factors drive our perennial obsession with the end of the world.

As Dorian Lynskey writes, “People have been contemplating the end of the world for... Read more

He/She/They

By: Schuyler Bailar

Narrated by: Schuyler Bailar

Length: 11 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

From a trans rights activist and athlete, an urgent guide that changes the conversation about gender identity.

Anti-transgender legislation is being introduced in state governments around the United States in record-breaking numbers. Trans people are under attack in sports, healthcare, school curriculum, bathrooms, bars, and nearly every walk of... Read more

The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

By: Sara Ahmed

Narrated by: Sara Ahmed

Length: 9 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

A renowned feminist thinker argues we need to get in the way of happiness, our own and other people’s, to build a more just world  Do you refuse to laugh at offensive jokes? Have you ever been accused of ruining dinner by pointing out your companion’s sexist comment? Are you often told to stop being so “woke”? If so, you might be a feminist... Read more

The Gene

By: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris

Length: 19 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

2017 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction

The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller
The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what... Read more

Four Hundred Souls

By: Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha N. Blain

Narrated by: Various

Length: 14 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present—edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.

The story begins in 1619—a year before the Mayflower—when the White Lion... Read more

All in Her Head

By: Elizabeth Comen

Narrated by: Anna Caputo

Length: 13 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

USA Today BestsellerA surprising, groundbreaking, and fiercely entertaining medical history that is both a collective narrative of women’s bodies and a call to action for a new conversation around women’s health.For as long as medicine has been a practice, women's bodies have been treated like objects to be practiced on: examined and ignored,... Read more

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

By: Charles E. Cobb, Jr.

Narrated by: Leon Nixon

Length: 11 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Visiting Martin Luther King Jr., at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. Just for self defense, King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend's Montgomery, Alabama home as an arsenal. Like King, many... Read more

Before We Were Trans

By: Dr. Kit Heyam

Narrated by: Dr. Kit Heyam

Length: 8 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity  

Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives.  
 
Before We Were Trans illuminates... Read more

You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey

By: Amber Ruffin & Lacey Lamar

Narrated by: Amber Ruffin & Lacey Lamar

Length: 5 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

Writer and performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers Amber Ruffin writes with her sister Lacey Lamar with humor and heart to share absurd anecdotes about everyday experiences of racism.

Now a writer and performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers and host of The Amber Ruffin Show, Amber Ruffin lives in New York, where she is no one's First Black... Read more

The Intersectional Environmentalist

By: Leah Thomas

Narrated by: Leah Thomas, Hayden Bishop & Erin Walker

Length: 4 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

From the activist who coined the term comes a primer on intersectional environmentalism for the next generation of activists looking to create meaningful, inclusive, and sustainable change. The Intersectional Environmentalist examines the inextricable link between environmentalism, racism, and privilege, and promotes awareness of the fundamental... Read more

There's Nothing Like This

By: Kevin Evers

Narrated by: Candace Joice

Length: 8 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Singer-songwriter. Trailblazer. Mastermind. The Beatles of her generation. From her genre-busting rise in country music as a teenager to the economic juggernaut that is the Eras Tour, Taylor Swift has blazed a path that is uniquely hers. But how exactly has she managed to scale her success—multiple times—while dominating an industry that cycles... Read more

Liliana's Invincible Summer (Pulitzer Prize winner)

By: Cristina Rivera Garza

Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal

Length: 8 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “A searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sister’s murderer to justice years after the fact” (The Boston Globe), from “one of Mexico’s greatest living writers” (Jonathan Lethem).
 
“Part memoir, part true-crime story, Garza’s chronicle is both... Read more

The Age of Grievance

By: Frank Bruni

Narrated by: Frank Bruni

Length: 9 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Brilliant...Bruni writes with humor, insight, and precision.” —Wall Street Journal • “The best prescription for our redemption.” —The New York Times • “A wise and humane book for our foolish and cruel era.” —Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation

From bestselling author and longtime New York Times columnist... Read more

Cults Like Us

By: Jane Borden

Narrated by: Jane Borden

Length: 10 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

For readers of Fantasyland and Cultish, a colorful and enlightening pop history that explains why the eccentric doomsday beliefs of our Puritan founders are still driving American culture today, contextualizes the current rise in far-right extremism as a natural result of our latent indoctrination, and proposes that the United States is the... Read more

Being Mortal

By: Atul Gawande

Narrated by: Robert Petkoff

Length: 9 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

#1 New York Times Bestseller

In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable... Read more

Reconnected

By: Carlos Whittaker

Narrated by: Carlos Whittaker

Length: 6 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

USA TODAY BESTSELLERRead by the author.Change your relationship with technology. Change your life.Share. Post. Reply…Most of us have gotten so used to notifications and alerts, pings and rings, that even if we don't want to be on our phones so much, we don't know what to do about it. The constant flow of information affects our brains,... Read more