Social Science audiobooks

Knife

By: Salman Rushdie

Narrated by: Salman Rushdie

Length: 6 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him
 
On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the... Read more

White Tears/Brown Scars

By: Ruby Hamad

Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò

Length: 7 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

Called "powerful and provocative" by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the New York Times bestselling How to be an Antiracist, this explosive book of history and cultural criticism reveals how white feminism has been used as a weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous women, and women of color.

Taking us from the... Read more

Stay True

By: Hua Hsu

Narrated by: Hua Hsu

Length: 5 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu

“This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come.” —Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling... Read more

Mating in Captivity

By: Esther Perel

Narrated by: Esther Perel

Length: 8 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

A New York City therapist examines the paradoxical relationship between domesticity and sexual desire and explains what it takes to bring lust home.One of the world’s most respected voices on erotic intelligence, Esther Perel offers a bold, provocative new take on intimacy and sex. Mating in Captivity invites us to explore the paradoxical union... 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

Refusing Compulsory Sexuality

By: Sherronda J. Brown

Narrated by: Yu-Li Alice Shen

Length: 6 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

For readers of Ace and Belly of the Beast: A Black queer feminist exploration of asexuality--and an incisive interrogation of the sex-obsessed culture that invisibilizes and ignores asexual and A-spec identity.

Everything you know about sex and asexuality is (probably) wrong.

The notion that everyone wants sex--and that we all have to have it--is... Read more

So You Want to Talk about Race

By: Ijeoma Oluo

Narrated by: Bahni Turpin

Length: 7 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

In this #1 New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a revelatory examination of race in AmericaA current, constructive, and actionable exploration of today’s racial landscape, offering straightforward clarity that readers of all races need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divideIn So You Want to Talk about Race,... Read more

Evicted

By: Matthew Desmond

Narrated by: Dion Graham

Length: 11 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • One of the most acclaimed books of our time, this modern classic “has set a new standard for reporting on poverty” (Barbara Ehrenreich, The New York Times Book Review).

In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius”... Read more

Know My Name

By: Chanel Miller

Narrated by: Chanel Miller

Length: 15 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

Universally acclaimed, rapturously reviewed, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and an instant New York Times bestseller, Chanel Miller's breathtaking memoir "gives readers the privilege of knowing her not just as Emily Doe, but as Chanel Miller the writer, the artist, the survivor, the fighter." (The Wrap).

"I... Read more

When the Night Comes Falling

By: Howard Blum

Narrated by: Zac Aleman

Length: 5 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

The definitive, inside story of the Idaho murders from bestselling author Howard Blum, whose groundbreaking coverage of the story was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.Timed for a trial that will capture national attention, When the Night Comes Falling examines the mysterious murders of the four University of Idaho students. Having covered this... Read more

Stamped from the Beginning

By: Ibram X. Kendi

Narrated by: Avery Kidd Waddell

Length: 23 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America—it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit.



In... Read more

Guns, Germs, and Steel

By: Jared Diamond

Narrated by: Doug Ordunio

Length: 16 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history.
 
Having done field work in New Guinea for more than 30 years, Jared Diamond presents the geographical and ecological factors that have shaped the modern world. From the viewpoint of an evolutionary... Read more

We Refuse

By: Kellie Carter Jackson

Narrated by: Kellie Carter Jackson

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence and Malcolm X's "by any means necessary." In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression,... Read more

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory

By: Tim Alberta

Narrated by: Tim Alberta

Length: 18 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

Instant New York Times BestsellerOne of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of the YearAn Economist and Air Mail Best Book of the Year""Brave and absorbing."" -- New York Times“Alberta is not just a thorough and responsible reporter but a vibrant writer, capable of rendering a farcical scene in vivid hues.” -- Washington Post“An astonishingly... Read more

The Radium Girls

By: Kate Moore

Narrated by: Angela Brazil

Length: 15 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous—the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls.

As the... 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

Together

By: Vivek H. Murthy

Narrated by: Vivek H. Murthy

Length: 10 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

The book we need NOW to avoid a social recession, Murthy’s prescient message is about the importance of human connection, the hidden impact of loneliness on our health, and the social power of community.Humans are social creatures: In this simple and obvious fact lies both the problem and the solution to the current crisis of loneliness. In his... Read more

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

By: Alice Wong

Narrated by: Alejandra Ospina & Alice Wong

Length: 8 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent—but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of... Read more

The Other Significant Others

By: Rhaina Cohen

Narrated by: Rhaina Cohen

Length: 8 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

"Author Rhaina Cohen’s vocal warmth and commitment to her ideas make this a touching audiobook. Her thinking and humanitarian spirit are well served by a performance that resonates with her broad sociological perspectives, as well as her desire to connect with listeners."—AudioFile

This program is read by the author.

"Rhaina Cohen’s moving,... Read more

Magic Pill

By: Johann Hari

Narrated by: Johann Hari

Length: 8 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

The bestselling author of Lost Connections and Stolen Focus offers a revelatory look at the new drugs transforming weight loss as we know it—from his personal experience on Ozempic to our ability to heal our society’s dysfunctional relationship with food, weight, and our bodies.

In January 2023, Johann Hari started to inject himself once a week... Read more

Burn Book

By: Kara Swisher

Narrated by: Kara Swisher

Length: 7 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

Instant New York Times Bestseller

From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.

“Swisher, the bad-ass journalist and OG chronicler of Silicon Valley…takes no prisoners in this highly readable look at the evolution... Read more

Frostbite

By: Nicola Twilley

Narrated by: Nicola Twilley

Length: 12 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

"Engrossing...hard to put down." — The New York Times

“Frostbite is a perfectly executed cold fusion of science, history, and literary verve . . . as a fellow nonfiction writer, I bow down. This is how it's done.” — Mary Roach, author of Fuzz and Stiff

An engaging and far-reaching exploration of refrigeration, tracing its evolution from scientific... Read more

The Coddling of the American Mind

By: Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

Narrated by: Jonathan Haidt

Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising—on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen?

First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and... Read more

Rest Is Resistance

By: Tricia Hersey

Narrated by: Tricia Hersey

Length: 5 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Disrupt and push back against capitalism and white supremacy by connecting to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming, and naps as a foundation for healing and justice. Tricia Hersey, aka The Nap Bishop, encourages us to elevate rest as a form of resistance and a divine human right.

What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too... Read more