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.
Why do we fear vaccines? National Book Critics Circle Award winning author Eula Biss offers a provocative examination of a flashpoint issue in our modern age, illuminated by the invaluable context provided by our scientific, mythological and literary past. Learn More
by Sonya Bilocerkowycz; read by Sonya Bilocerkowycz
In these linked essays, Sonya Bilocerkowycz invites listeners to meet a swirling cast of post-Soviet characters, including a Russian intelligence officer who finds Osama bin Laden a few weeks after 9/11; a Ukrainian poet whose nose gets broken by Russian separatists; and a long-lost relative who drives a bus into the heart of Chernobyl. On Our Way Home from the Revolution muddles our easy distinctions between innocence and culpability, agency and fate. Learn More
edited by Andrew Blauner; with Siri Hustvedt, Andre Aciman, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Alex Pheby, and Colm Toibin; read by Perry Daniels and Dina Pearlman
NEW! Now Available
A collection of colorful and candid essays and other pieces about Freud and his legacy today, featuring twenty-five leading writers. Learn More
In One Nation Under Gold, acclaimed author James Ledbetter traces the origins of our national obsession with gold and expertly explores the controversies around this hallowed metal. Learn More
An inside look at the obsessive, secretive, and often bizarre world of high-profile stamp collecting, told through the journey of the world’s most sought-after stamp. Learn More
An innovative recasting of US legal and economic history through the power of clothing for those who lacked power and status in American society. Learn More
Using a variety of sources, The Opening of the Protestant Mind traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonization of North America. Learn More
Revisiting the films that don't make the Academy Award montages, Charles Taylor finds a treasury many of us have forgotten, movies that in fact "unlock the secrets of the times." Learn More
The never-before-told true story of how mobster Charles "Lucky" Luciano—the US Mafia boss who put the "organized" into organized crime—was recruited by US Naval Intelligence to turn the tide of WWII. Learn More
Since the release of the documentary Blackfish in 2013, millions around the world have focused on the plight of the orca, the most profitable and controversial display animal in history. Yet, until now, no historical account has explained how we came to care about killer whales in the first place. Learn More
A lively account of how Darwin's work on natural selection transformed science and society, and an investigation into the mysterious illness that plagued its author. Learn More
by Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, and Joseph Wright; read by Suzie Althens
F O R T H C O M I N G ! Available January
Since the end of World War II, democracies typically fell apart by coup d'état or through force. Today, however, they are increasingly eroding at the hands of democratically elected incumbents, who seize control by slowly chipping away at democratic institutions. To better understand these developments, this book examines the role of personalist political parties, or parties that exist primarily to further their leader's career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform. Learn More
Paris, the City of Light. The city of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, of soft cheese and fresh baguettes. Or so tourist brochures would have you believe. In The Other Paris: The People's City, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Luc Sante reveals the city's hidden past, its seamy underside, one populated by working and criminal classes that, though virtually extinct today, have shaped Paris over the past two centuries. Learn More
A landmark work of intimate reporting on inequality, race, class, and violence, told through a murder and intersecting lives in an iconic American neighborhood. Learn More