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.
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
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
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
The beauty, genius and heroism of the human spirit shines throughout this collection of encounters with exceptional individuals, selected and presented by NPR personalities whose lives have been enriched by a single conversation. Learn More
by Stephen A. Smoot; foreword by Congressman Alex X. Mooney; read by Mike Chamberlain
A ten-count indictment on how socialism not only ruins countries and their economies, but also destroys civil societies while denying natural rights. Learn More
Nowhere does the ceaseless struggle to maintain democracy in the face of political corruption come more alive than in Paul Preston's magisterial history of modern Spain. Learn More
Like the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer—books that have paved the way for important narratives that shape how we perceive not only the politics of our time but also our way of life—The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is an instant, essential classic, an authoritative depiction of a country struggling to make sense of itself. Learn More
Despite the key part he played in the country's founding, few Americans today have heard of John Dickinson. Early chroniclers and historians cast him as a coward and Loyalist for not signing the Declaration. Many later historians have simply accepted and echoed this distorted and dismissive view. Jane Calvert's fascinating, authoritative, and accessible biography, the first complete account of Dickinson's life and work, restores him to a place of prominence in the nation's formative years. Learn More
Gordon W. Prange with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon; read by Tony Roberts
There is no better, more authoritative chronicle of Pearl Harbor and its repercussions than the three Gordon W. Prange titles collected here. Learn More
In The Peacemakers, a kind of global edition of John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Bruce Jentleson shows how key figures in the previous century rewrote the zero-sum and transactional scripts they were handed and successfully prevented conflict, advanced human rights, and promoted global sustainability. Learn More
A bold argument that tackles current trends, such as rising nationalism, arguing that they strengthen rather than undermine transatlantic ties. Learn More
Lambda Literary Award Winner 2020 Aspen Words Literary Prize Longlist #1 Downloaded title on Audible in LGBT Literature Jenna Bush Hagar Book Club Pick BuzzFeed Summer Reads O Magazine's Best Books by Women of Summer 201
A beautifully layered portrait of motherhood, immigration, and the sacrifices we make in the name of love from award-winning novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn. Learn More
This authoritative biography of Patrick Henry—the underappreciated founding father best known for saying, "Give me liberty, or give me death!"—restores him and his fellow Virginians to their seminal place in the story of American independence. Learn More
The search for a "patient zero"—popularly understood to be the first person infected in an epidemic—has been key to media coverage of major infectious disease outbreaks for more than three decades. Yet the term itself did not exist before the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. How did this idea so swiftly come to exert such a strong grip on the scientific, media, and popular consciousness? Learn More
Acclaimed travel writer Jonathan Raban invites us aboard his boat, a floating cottage cluttered with books, curling manuscripts, and dead ballpoint pens. Learn More
