Experience our world: as it was, as it is, as it might become with these audiobooks about history, the arts, culture, education, and politics. Don't miss Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, or Fresh Air with Terry Gross: Writers, or Gwen Ifill's The Breakthrough.
by Khaled Khalifa; translated by Leri Price; read by Neil Shah
2019 National Book Award Finalist
Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria's ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination. Learn More
With the same breadth of vision and narrative élan he brought to his monumental biographies of the great financiers, Ron Chernow examines the forces that made dynasties like the Morgans, the Warburgs, and the Rothschilds the financial arbiters of the early twentieth century and then rendered them virtually obsolete by the century's end. Learn More
Democracy: A Guided Tour gives listeners a crash course on the evolution of the idea of democracy, how it has been and is currently practiced, and how we might think about it as we head into a new chapter in its story. Learn More
by Lawrence R. Jacobs; read by Michael Butler Murray
In Democracy under Fire, Lawrence Jacobs provides a highly engaging history of political reforms since the late-eighteenth century that over time dangerously weakened democracy, widened political inequality as well as racial disparities, and rewarded toxic political polarization. Learn More
by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts; read by Tom Perkins
Denmark Vesey's Garden joins the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting new interpretations of slavery's enduring legacy in the United States. Learn More
From internationally bestselling author and journalist Andrew Smith, an immersive, alarming, sharp-eyed journey into the bizarre world of computer code, told through his sometimes painful, often amusing attempt to become a coder himself. Learn More
Devoid of salacious gossip and groundless speculation, Diana's Boys is the first candid chronicle of the world's two most celebrated royalsand far more. Learn More
by Paul Dawson & Brian Sheldon; read by Matthew Boston
When it comes to food safety and germs, there are as many common questions as there are misconceptions. And yet there has never been a book that clearly examines the science behind these important issues—until now. Learn More
A deep look into the raging social media battles between red and blue Americans and the growing threat to U.S. democracy from right-wing extremism. Learn More
by Kevin M. De Cock, Harold W. Jaffe, and James W. Curran; edited by Robin Moseley; read by Curtis Michael Holland
Authentic and insightful, Dispatches from the AIDS Pandemic provides an authoritative account of an epidemic and its central role in the expansion of global public health. Learn More
A prize-winning memoirist and nature writer turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future. Learn More