Social Science audiobooks

The Mushroom at the End of the World

By: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Narrated by: Susan Ericksen

Length: 11 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions,... 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

How We Show Up

By: Mia Birdsong

Narrated by: Mia Birdsong

Length: 6 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

An Invitation to Community and Models for Connection

After almost every presentation activist and writer Mia Birdsong gives to executives, think tanks, and policy makers, one of those leaders quietly confesses how much they long for the profound community she describes. They have family, friends, and colleagues, yet they still feel like they're... Read more

You're Not Listening

By: Kate Murphy

Narrated by: Kate Murphy

Length: 6 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

"Narrating her own work, Murphy is certainly worthy of the listener's attention. She offers a sincere, passionate voice that is capable of delivering some hard truths about the current state of things while also showing the way toward a truly connected society." — AudioFile Magazine

**This program is read by the author**

When was the last time you... Read more

The Body Is Not an Apology, Second Edition

By: Sonya Renee Taylor

Narrated by: Sonya Renee Taylor

Length: 5 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

New York Times bestseller! "To build a world that works for everyone, we must first make the radical decision to love every facet of ourselves. . . . 'The body is not an apology' is the mantra we should all embrace."
—Kimberlé Crenshaw, legal scholar and founder and Executive Director, African American Policy Forum

Humans are a varied and... Read more

Facing the Mountain

By: Daniel James Brown

Narrated by: Louis Ozawa

Length: 17 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
One of NPR's "Books We Love" of 2021
Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography 

Winner of the Christopher Award 
 
“Masterly. An epic story of four Japanese-American families and their sons who volunteered for military service and displayed uncommon heroism… Propulsive and gripping, in part because... 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

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

Hillbilly Elegy

By: J. D. Vance

Narrated by: J. D. Vance

Length: 6 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working classHillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a... 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

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By: Rebecca Skloot

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell & Bahni Turpin

Length: 12 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The story of modern medicine and bioethics—and, indeed, race relations—is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”—Entertainment Weekly

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE • ONE OF THE “MOST INFLUENTIAL” (CNN), “DEFINING” (LITHUB), AND “BEST” (THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF... Read more

Dear America

By: Jose Antonio Vargas

Narrated by: Jose Antonio Vargas

Length: 5 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “the most famous undocumented immigrant in America,” tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms.“This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book––at it's core––is not about immigration at all. This book is about... Read more

Love Is an Ex-Country

By: Randa Jarrar

Narrated by: Randa Jarrar

Length: 5 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

Queer. Muslim. Arab American. A proudly Fat woman. Randa Jarrar is all of these things. In this provocative memoir of a cross-country road trip, she explores how to claim joy in an unraveling and hostile America.

Randa Jarrar is a fearless voice of dissent who has been called "politically incorrect" (Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times). As an... 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

This Will Be My Undoing

By: Morgan Jerkins

Narrated by: Morgan Jerkins

Length: 7 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

From one of the fiercest critics writing today, Morgan Jerkins’ highly-anticipated collection of linked essays interweaves her incisive commentary on pop culture, feminism, black history, misogyny, and racism with her own experiences to confront the very real challenges of being a black woman today—perfect for fans of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist,... Read more

Big Friendship

By: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman

Narrated by: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman

Length: 5 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

A close friendship is one of the most influential and important relationships a human life can contain. Anyone will tell you that! But for all the rosy sentiments surrounding friendship, most people don’t talk much about what it really takes to stay close for the long haul.

Now two friends, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, tell the story of their... Read more

The Witches Are Coming

By: Lindy West

Narrated by: Lindy West

Length: 6 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

In this wickedly funny cultural critique, the author of the critically acclaimed memoir and Hulu series Shrill exposes misogyny in the #MeToo era.

This is a witch hunt. We're witches, and we're hunting you.

From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice,... Read more

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism

By: Kristen R. Ghodsee

Narrated by: Esther Wane

Length: 5 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

A spirited, deeply researched exploration of why capitalism is bad for women and how, when done right, socialism leads to economic independence, better labor conditions, better work-life balance and, yes, even better sex.

In a witty, irreverent op-ed piece that went viral, Kristen Ghodsee argued that women had better sex under socialism. The... Read more

The Devil's Best Trick

By: Randall Sullivan

Narrated by: Lane Hakel

Length: 13 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

How we explain the evils of the world, and the darkest parts of ourselves, has preoccupied humans throughout history. A sweeping and comprehensive search for the origins of belief in a Satanic figure across the centuries, The Devil’s Best Trick is a keen investigation into the inescapable reality of evil and the myriad ways we attempt to... Read more

The Color of Law

By: Richard Rothstein

Narrated by: Adam Grupper

Length: 9 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation-that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate... Read more

The Song of the Cell

By: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris

Length: 16 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences and the 2023 Chautauqua Prize!

Named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot, the New York Public Library, and more!

In The Song of the Cell, the extraordinary author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning... 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

In Defense of Witches

By: Mona Chollet

Narrated by: Alix Dunmore

Length: 7 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

Mona Chollet's In Defense of Witches is a “brilliant, well-documented” celebration (Le Monde) by an acclaimed French feminist of the witch as a symbol of female rebellion and independence in the face of misogyny and persecution.

Centuries after the infamous witch hunts that swept through Europe and America, witches continue to hold a unique... Read more

He/She/They

By: Schuyler Bailar

Narrated by: Schuyler Bailar

Length: 11 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Go‑to expert on gender identity, Schuyler Bailar, offers an essential, urgent guide that changes the conversation about gender identity and how we talk about it.

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... Read more