Social Science audiobooks

A History of Magic, Witchcraft, and the Occult

By: DK

Narrated by: Susie Riddell

Length: 8 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

Discover the beguiling history of witchcraft, magic, and superstition through the centuries and across the world in this stunningly audiobook.

A History of Magic, Witchcraft and the Occult charts the extraordinary narrative of one of the most interesting and often controversial subjects in the world - from ancient animal worship and shamanism,... Read more

The Right to Sex

By: Amia Srinivasan

Narrated by: Andia Winslow

Length: 6 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

“Laser-cut writing and a stunning intellect. If only every writer made this much beautiful sense.”
—Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

“Amia Srinivasan is an unparalleled and extraordinary writer—no one X-rays an argument, a desire, a contradiction, a defense mechanism quite like her. In stripping the new politics of sex and power down to its... Read more

Bad Mexicans

By: Kelly Lytle Hernández

Narrated by: Joana Garcia

Length: 13 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Bad Mexicans tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. Led by a brilliant but ill-tempered radical named Ricardo Flores Magón, the magonistas were a motley band of journalists, miners, migrant workers, and more, who organized thousands of Mexican workers—and... Read more

Freakonomics Rev Ed

By: Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Narrated by: Stephen J. Dubner

Length: 7 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner offer the long-awaited paperback edition of Freakonomics, the runaway bestseller, including six Freakonomics columns from the New York Times Magazine and a Q & A with the authors. Read more

One Summer

By: Bill Bryson

Narrated by: Bill Bryson

Length: 17 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book
A GoodReads Reader's Choice

In One Summer Bill Bryson, one of our greatest and most beloved nonfiction writers, transports readers on a journey back to one amazing season in American life.

The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became... Read more

Race After Technology

By: Ruha Benjamin

Narrated by: Mia Ellis

Length: 6 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.

Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen... Read more

Black on Both Sides

By: C. Riley Snorton

Narrated by: C. Riley Snorton

Length: 8 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives. Their erasure from trans history masks the ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on... Read more

The Address Book

By: Deirdre Mask

Narrated by: Janina Edwards

Length: 8 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

An extraordinary debut in the tradition of classic works from authors such as Mark Kurlansky, Mary Roach, and Rose George.An exuberant and insightful work of popular history of how streets got their names, houses their numbers, and what it reveals about class, race, power, and identity.When most people think about street addresses, if they think... Read more

The Power Broker: Volume 3 of 3

By: Robert A. Caro

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 20 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A modern American classic, this huge and galvanizing biography of Robert Moses reveals not only the saga of one man’s incredible accumulation of power but the story of his shaping (and mis-shaping of twentieth-century New York.  One of the Modern Library’s hundred greatest books of the twentieth century.

Robert Caro's... Read more

The Price of the Ticket

By: James Baldwin

Narrated by: JD Jackson

Length: 34 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

An essential compendium of James Baldwin’s most powerful nonfiction work, calling on us “to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country.”

Personal and prophetic, these essays uncover what it means to live in a racist American society with insights that feel as fresh today as they did over the 4 decades in which he composed them. Longtime... Read more

Your Face Belongs to Us

By: Kashmir Hill

Narrated by: Kashmir Hill

Length: 10 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The story of a small AI company that gave facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses, threatening to end privacy as we know it

“The dystopian future portrayed in some science-fiction movies is already upon us. Kashmir Hill’s fascinating book brings home the scary implications of this new... 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

A Short History of Trans Misogyny

By: Jules Gill-Peterson

Narrated by: Charli Burrow

Length: 5 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

"A beautifully written and argued book." —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby



There is no shortage of voices demanding everyone pay attention to the violence trans women suffer. But one frighteningly basic question seems never to be answered: why does it happen? If men are not inherently evil and trans women do not intrinsically invite... Read more

The Hammer

By: Hamilton Nolan

Narrated by: Hamilton Nolan

Length: 9 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

A timely, in-depth, and vital exploration of the American labor movement and its critical place in our society and politics, from acclaimed labor reporter Hamilton Nolan.
 
Inequality is America’s biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix it. Organized labor has been in decline for decades. Yet it sits... Read more

All the Gold Stars

By: Rainesford Stauffer

Narrated by: Jess Nahikian

Length: 8 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

From journalist and author of An Ordinary Age, an examination, dismantling, and reconstruction of ambition, where burnout is the symptom of our holiest sin: the lonely way we strive.

Ambition—the want, the hunger, the need to achieve—is woven into America’s fabric from the first colonization to capitalism. From our first gold star assignment to... Read more

If You Can't Take the Heat

By: Geraldine DeRuiter

Narrated by: Geraldine DeRuiter

Length: 9 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the James Beard Award–winning blogger behind The Everywhereist come hilarious, searing essays on how food and cooking stoke the flames of her feminism.

“With charm and humor, Geraldine DeRuiter welcomes us into her personal history and thus reconnects us with ourselves.”—Mikki Kendall, New York Times bestselling author... Read more

Work Won't Love You Back

By: Sarah Jaffe

Narrated by: Sarah Jaffe

Length: 12 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

A deeply-reported examination of why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.

You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor... Read more

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

By: David Grann

Narrated by: Mark Deakins

Length: 13 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Acclaimed New Yorker writer and author of the breakout debut bestseller The Lost City of Z, David Grann offers a collection of spellbinding narrative journalism.

Whether he’s reporting on the infiltration of the murderous Aryan Brotherhood into the U.S. prison system, tracking down a chameleon con artist in Europe, or riding in a cyclone- tossed... Read more

Maps of Meaning

By: Jordan B. Peterson

Narrated by: Jordan B. Peterson

Length: 30 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning is now available for the first time as an audio download!

Why have people from different cultures and eras formulated myths and stories with similar structures? What does this similarity tell us about the mind, morality, and structure of the world itself? From the author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to... Read more

Cobalt Red

By: Siddharth Kara

Narrated by: Peter Ganim

Length: 11 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

This program includes an author's note read by the author.

An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation—and the moral implications that affect us all.

Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the... Read more

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

By: Scott J. Shapiro

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

Length: 15 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

"Unsettling, absolutely riveting, and—for better or worse—necessary reading." —Brian Christian, author of Algorithms to Live By and The Alignment Problem

An entertaining account of the philosophy and technology of hacking—and why we all need to understand it.

It’s a signal paradox of our times that we live in an information society but do not know... Read more

From Here to Equality

By: William A. Darity, Jr. & A. Kirsten Mullen

Narrated by: JD Jackson

Length: 14 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction, when the US government temporarily implemented a major... Read more

The Patriarchs

By: Angela Saini

Narrated by: Sohm Kapila

Length: 10 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

For fans of Sapiens and The Dawn of Everything, a groundbreaking exploration of gendered oppression—its origins, its histories, our attempts to understand it, and our efforts to combat it

For centuries, societies have treated male domination as natural to the human species. But how would our understanding of gender inequality—our imagined past... Read more

From Cradle to Stage

By: Virginia Grohl

Narrated by: Virginia Grohl

Length: 8 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Written by Virginia Grohl, the mother of Dave Grohl—former Nirvana drummer and current frontman for the Foo Fighters—From Cradle to Stage shares stories and exclusive photos featuring mothers of rock icons, the icons themselves, and their Behind the Music-style relationships

While the Grohl family had always been musical-the family sang together... Read more