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.
Raising the literary bar to a new level, Jerome Charyn re-creates the voice of Theodore Roosevelt, the New York City police commissioner, Rough Rider, and soon-to-be twenty-sixth president through his derring-do adventures, effortlessly combining superhero dialogue with haunting pathos. Learn More
by Mercy Fontenot, Lyndsey Parker; read by Natasha Soudek
Mercy Fontenot was a Zelig who grew up in the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury scene, where she crossed paths with Charles Manson, went to the first Acid Test, and was friends with Jimi Hendrix (she was later in his movie Rainbow Bridge). Written just prior to her death in 2020, Permanent Damage shows us the world of the 1960s and 1970s music scene through Mercy's eyes. Learn More
The riveting story of the man who couldn’t remember: H. M., the famous brain-damaged patient whose case afforded untold advances in the study of memory. Learn More
Written by Daniel Nettle—author of the popular book Happiness—this brief volume takes the listener on an exhilarating tour of what modern science can tell us about human personality. Learn More
by Merrick Rosenberg with Richard Ellis; read by Jonathan Yen
Personality has determined the winner of the last twenty-two US presidential elections—and it will decide who wins in the future. If you're wondering whether Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, or another Democratic candidate can beat Donald Trump in the 2020 election, this book has the answer. Learn More
Burning fossil fuels will cause catastrophic global warming: this is what top American oil executives were told by scientists in 1959. But they ignored that warning. Instead, they developed one of the biggest, most polluting oil sources in the world―the oil sands in Alberta, Canada. As investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki reveals in this explosive book, the decades-long conspiracy to keep the oil sands flowing into the US would turn out to be one of the biggest reasons for the world's failure to stop the climate crisis. Learn More
Science journalist Jessica Wapner goes beyond the headlines to share the fascinating backstory on ground-breaking cancer research and the genetic science behind it.
Picasso's War sheds light on the conflict that was an ominous prelude to WWII and delivers an unforgettable portrait of a genius whose visionary statement about horror and terrible wounds of war still resonates today. Learn More
What does it mean to be human in the twenty-first century? In this innovative examination of our present reality, award-winning writer Laurence Scott charts the ways our traditional mental models of the world have started to fray. Learn More
by Suzanne McConnell & Kurt Vonnegut; read by Karen White
The art and craft of writing by one of the few grandmasters of American literature, a bonanza for writers and readers written by Kurt Vonnegut's former student. Learn More
Going well beyond a critical discussion of a single television program, this book will use The Simpsons as a window on the culture at large to deliver first-hand reportage of the defining events and trends of our accelerated, confounding era. Learn More