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.
A leading Renaissance scholar shows in this revisionist history how four powerful women redefined the culture of European monarchy in the glorious sixteenth century. Learn More
The United States and China are engaged in a broad-gauged and global competition for power. While this competition ranges across the entire world, it is centered in Asia. In this book, David Shambaugh focuses on the critical sub-region of Southeast Asia. Learn More
Margarett Sargent was an icon of avant-garde art in the 1920s. In an evocative weave of biography and memoir, her granddaughter unearths for the first time the life of a spirited and gifted woman committed at all costs to self-expression. Learn More
This revelatory history of the elusive National Security Council shows how staffers operating in the shadows have driven foreign policy clandestinely for decades. Learn More
A historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, of students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic record of a journey through Uzbekistan and of the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity. Learn More
Drawing upon the author's two decades teaching medical ethics, as well as his work as a practicing psychiatrist, this profound and addictive little book offers up challenging ethical dilemmas and asks listeners, What would you do?Learn More
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist New York Times Book Review Best Books of the Year: TIME, Kirkus Reviews
A supremely talented young critic's essays on race and culture, from Toni Morrison to trap, herald the arrival of a major new voice in American letters. Learn More
Parents of the 1940s and 1950s raised their Baby Boomer children to be respectable church-attendees, and yet in some ways demonstrated an ambivalence that permitted their children to spurn religion and eventually to raise their own children to be the least religious generation ever. This study is the first to offer a sociological account of the sudden transition from religious parents to non-religious children and grandchildren, focusing exclusively on ex–Anglican Boomers. Learn More
by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey; read by Janet Metzger
From Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, an insightful and passionately written book explaining why a return to Enlightenment ideals is good for the world. Learn More
A senior federal judge's incisive, unsettling exploration of some of the paradoxes that define the judiciary today, Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free features essays examining why innocent people plead guilty, why high-level executives aren't prosecuted, why you won't get your day in court, and why the judiciary is curtailing its own constitutionally mandated power. Learn More
This book looks at how the legacy of the New Deal, both for good and ill, informs the current debates around governmental responses to crises. Learn More
Fans of the movie and those interested in deeper discussions about the film will revel in this thought-provoking examination of all aspects of Black Panther and the power of psychology. Learn More
Why has war been such a consistent presence throughout the human past? A leading historian explains, drawing on rich examples and keen insight. Learn More
A fresh, revelatory foray into the new science of dreams—how they work, what they're for, and how we can reap the benefits of our own nocturnal life. Learn More
How we feel is as vital to our survival as how we think. This claim, based on the premise that emotions are largely adaptive, serves as the organizing theme of Why We Need Religion. This book is a novel pathway in a well-trodden field of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Learn More
The story of the Mexican-American warone of the most controversial events in nineteenth-century American historyand of how it divided the country and profoundly impacted the political lives of James Polk, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln. Learn More
Wild Horse Country is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter's history of wild horses in America―and an eye-opening story on their treatment in our time. Learn More