Audiobooks narrated by Jeff Zinn

Don't Build, Rebuild: The Case for Imaginative Reuse in Architecture

In a time of climate crisis and housing shortages, a bold, visionary call to replace current wasteful construction practices with an architecture of reuse As climate change has escalated into a crisis, the reuse of existing structures is the only way to even begin to preserve our wood, sand, silicon, and iron, let alone stop belching carbon monoxide into the air. Our housing crisis means that we need usable buildings now more than ever, but architect and critic Aaron Betsky shows that new construction-often seeking to maximize profits rather than resources, often soulless in its feel-is not the answer. Whenever possible, it is better to repair, recycle, renovate, and reuse-not only from an environmental perspective, but culturally and artistically as well. Architectural reuse is as old as civilization itself. In the streets of Europe, you can find fragments from the Roman Empire. More recently, marginalized communities from New York to Detroit-queer people looking for places to gather or cruise, punks looking to make loud music, artists and displaced people looking for space to work and live-have taken over industrial spaces created then abandoned by capitalism, forging a unique style in the process. Their methods-from urban mining to dumpster diving-now inform architects transforming old structures today. Betsky shows us contemporary imaginative reuse throughout the world: the Mexican housing authority transforming concrete slums into well-serviced apartments; the MassMOCA museum, built out of old textile mills; the squatted city of Christiana in Copenhagen, fashioned from an old army base; Project Heidelberg in Detroit. All point towards a new circular economy of reuse, built from the ashes of the capitalist economy of consumption.

Aaron Betsky (Author), Jeff Zinn, TBD (Narrator)

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The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick

12.7 billion doses of the COVID vaccine have been administered around the world, with nearly 613 million doses in the United States alone. Unfortunately, the vaccine has not been universally accepted, often as a result of the side-effects of the vaccine that were widely discussed in news outlets and amplified by social media, relaying anecdotes of people feeling sick after getting jabbed. But lost in this discussion of side effects and ignored by the CDC, vaccine experts, and the media is the inconvenient fact that a significant portion of these side effects were not actually caused by the vaccine. Instead, they were the result of our negative expectations, the so-called nocebo effect. “The nocebo effect” stems from the Latin word nocere, which translates roughly as “to harm” and can be best summarized as the occurrence of a harmful event that stems from consciously or subconsciously anticipating or expecting it. While there has never before been such a massive demonstration of the nocebo effect as with the COVID vaccine, there are myriad other examples throughout history, and we are just beginning to discover the power behind this phenomenon. In turns enlightening and informative, The Nocebo Effect is the first book to investigate this fascinating phenomenon and offers a wide variety of topics and angles by the foremost researchers in this emerging field.

Charlotte Blease, Michael H. Bernstein (Author), Jeff Zinn, TBD (Narrator)

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The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Wor

The story of a group of Goodyear Tire and Rubber workers fatally exposed to toxic chemicals, the lawyer who sought justice on their behalf, and the shameful lack of protection our society affords all workers A gripping narrative in the tradition of A Civil Action and Toms River Working at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company chemical plant in Niagara Falls, New York, was considered a good job. It was the kind of industrial manufacturing job that allowed blue-collar workers to thrive in the latter half of the 20th century--that allowed them to buy their own home, and maybe a boat for the lake. But it was also the kind of job that gave you bladder cancer. The Cancer Factory tells the story of the workers who experienced one of the nation's worst, and best-documented, outbreaks of work-related cancer, and the lawyer who has represented the bladder-cancer victims at the plant for more than thirty years, as well as the retired workers who have been diagnosed with the disease and live in constant fear of its recurrence. In doing so it tells a story of corporate malfeasance and governmental neglect. Workers have only weak protections from exposure to toxic substances in America, and regulatory breaches contribute to an estimated 95,000 deaths from occupational illness each year. Goodyear, and its chemical supplier, Dupont, knew that two of the chemicals used in the plant had been shown to cause cancer, but made little effort to protect the plant's workers until the cluster of bladder cancer cases--and deaths--was undeniable. Based on four decades of reporting and delving deeply into the scientific literature about toxic substances and health risks, the arcana of worker regulations, and reality of loose enforcement, The Cancer Factory exposes the sometimes deadly risks too many workers face.

Jim Morris (Author), Jeff Zinn, TBD (Narrator)

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Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life

Dismantles the Woody Guthrie we have been taught-the rough-and-ready rambling' man-to reveal an artist who discovered how intimacy is crucial for political struggle Woody Guthrie is often mythologized as the classic American "rambling' man," a real-life Steinbeckian folk hero who fought for working-class interests and inspired Bob Dylan. Biographers and fans frame him as a foe of fascism and focus on his politically charged folk songs. What's left unexamined is how the bulk of Guthrie's work-most of which is unpublished or little known-delves into the importance of intimacy in his personal and political life. Featuring an insert with personal photos of Guthrie's family and previously unknown paintings, Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life is a fresh and contemporary analysis of the overlapping influences of sexuality, politics, and disability on the art and mind of an American folk icon. Part biography, part cultural history of the Left, Woody Guthrie offers a stunning revelation about America's quintessential folk legend, who serves as a guiding light for leftist movements today. In his close relationship with dancer Marjorie Mazia, Guthrie discovered a restorative way of thinking about the body, which provided a salve for the trauma of his childhood and the slowly debilitating effects of Huntington's disease. Rejecting bodily shame and embracing the power of sexuality, he came to believe that intimacy was the linchpin for political struggle. By closely connecting to others, society could combat the customary emotional states of capitalist cultures: loneliness and isolation. Using intimacy as one's weapon, Guthrie believed we could fight fascism's seductive call.

Gustavus Stadler (Author), Jeff Zinn (Narrator)

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Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump

A long-overdue and sober examination of President Ronald Reagan's racist politics that continue to harm communities today and helped shape the modern conservative movement. Ronald Reagan is hailed as a transformative president and an American icon, but within his twentieth-century politics lies a racial legacy that is rarely discussed. Both political parties point to Reagan as the "right" kind of conservative but fail to acknowledge his political attacks on people of color prior to and during his presidency. Reconsidering Reagan corrects that narrative and reveals how his views, policies, and actions were devastating for Black Americans and racial minorities, and that the effects continue to resonate today. Using research from previously untapped resources including the Black press which critically covered Reagan's entire political career, Daniel S. Lucks traces Reagan's gradual embrace of conservatism, his opposition to landmark civil rights legislation, his coziness with segregationists, and his skill in tapping into white anxiety about race, riding a wave of "white backlash" all the way to the Presidency. He argues that Reagan has the worst civil rights record of any President since the 1920s-including supporting South African apartheid, packing courts with conservatives, targeting laws prohibiting discrimination in education and housing, and launching the "War on Drugs"-which had cataclysmic consequences on the lives of Black and Brown people. Linking the past to the present, Lucks expertly examines how Reagan set the blueprint for President Trump and proves that he is not an anomaly, but in fact the logical successor to bring back the racially tumultuous America that Reagan conceptualized.

Daniel S. Lucks (Author), Jeff Zinn (Narrator)

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Conflagration: How the Transcendentalists Sparked the American Struggle for Racial, Gender, and Soci

A dramatic retelling of the story of the Transcendentalists, revealing them not as isolated authors but as a community of social activists who shaped progressive American values. Conflagration illuminates the connections between key members of the Transcendentalist circle-including James Freeman Clarke, Elizabeth Peabody, Caroline Healey Dall, Elizabeth Stanton, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller-who created a community dedicated to radical social activism. These authors and activists laid the groundwork for democratic and progressive religion in America. In the tumultuous decades before and immediately after the Civil War, the Transcendentalists changed nineteenth-century America, leading what Theodore Parker called "a Second American Revolution." They instigated lasting change in American society, not only through their literary achievements but also through their activism: transcendentalists fought for the abolition of slavery, democratically governed churches, equal rights for women, and against the dehumanizing effects of brutal economic competition and growing social inequality. The Transcendentalists' passion for social equality stemmed from their belief in spiritual friendship-transcending differences in social situation, gender, class, theology, and race. Together, their fight for justice changed the American sociopolitical landscape. They understood that none of us can ever fulfill our own moral and spiritual potential unless we care about the full spiritual and moral flourishing of others.

John A. Buehrens (Author), Jeff Zinn (Narrator)

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The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally

An accurate picture of the LGBTQ rights movement's achievements is incomplete without this surprising history of how corporate America joined the cause. Legal scholar Carlos Ball tells the overlooked story of how LGBTQ activism aimed at corporations since the Stonewall riots helped turn them from enterprises either indifferent to or openly hostile toward sexual minorities and transgender individuals into reliable and powerful allies of the movement for queer equality. As a result of street protests and boycotts during the 1970s, AIDS activism directed at pharmaceutical companies in the 1980s, and the push for corporate nondiscrimination policies and domestic partnership benefits in the 1990s, LGBTQ activism changed big business's understanding and treatment of the queer community. By the 2000s, corporations were frequently and vigorously promoting LGBTQ equality, both within their walls and in the public sphere. Large companies such as American Airlines, Apple, Google, Marriott, and Walmart have been crucial allies in promoting marriage equality and opposing anti-LGBTQ regulations such as transgender bathroom laws. At a time when the LGBTQ movement is facing considerable political backlash, The Queering of Corporate America complicates the narrative of corporate conservatism and provides insights into the future legal, political, and cultural implications of this unexpected relationship.

Carlos A. Ball (Author), Jeff Zinn (Narrator)

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A Life Beyond Reason: A Father's Memoir

For readers of When Bad Things Happen to Good People and When Breath Becomes Air, the story of how one father's Kafka-esque foray into the bowels of American medicine forced him to reexamine his own values and the purpose of human life. Before becoming a father, Chris Gabbard was a fast-track academic finishing his doctoral dissertation at Stanford. A disciple of reason and all things steeped in the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers, Gabbard was influenced by his favorite philosophers-Socrates, Aristotle, John Locke, Peter Singer. That is, until he had August. Despite his faith in modern medicine, the very science Gabbard touted as infallible fails him. August was born nonverbal, unable to walk or feed himself due to an injury that was the likely result of medical error. In the midst of adjusting to a life of intense caregiving, doctor's visits, negotiations with Medicaid, and the pressure of mounting debt, he becomes obsessed with uncovering what doctors should have done differently to save his son from what he can only fathom as a life of suffering. But, as Gabbard cares for August during his short fourteen years of life, he experiences a profound evolution as the monumental truths of his idols give way and he comes to understand that his son is undeniably a person deserving of life. Unflinching and luminous, A Life Beyond Reason is an account of medical error, family, and excruciating personal and philosophical transformations for anyone who has questioned the very foundations of their beliefs.

Chris Gabbard (Author), Jeff Zinn (Narrator)

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God's Favorites: Judaism, Christianity, and the Myth of Divine Chosenness

A noted biblical scholar explores how the claim of divine choice has been used from ancient times to the present to justify territorial expansion and prejudice. The Bible describes many individuals and groups as specially chosen by God. But does God choose at all? Michael Coogan explains the temporally layered and allusive storytelling of biblical texts and describes the world of the ancient Near East from which it emerged, laying bare the power struggles, the acts of vengeance, and persecutions made sacred by claims of chosenness. Jumping forward to more modern contexts, Coogan reminds us how the self-designation of the Puritan colonizers of New England as God's new Israel eventually morphed, in the United States, into the self-justifying doctrines of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism. In contemporary Israel, both fundamentalist Zionists and their evangelical American partners cite the Jews' status as God's chosen people as justification for taking land-for very different ends. Appropriated uncritically, the Bible has thus been used to reinforce exclusivity and superiority, with new myths based on old myths. Finally, in place of the pernicious idea of chosenness, Coogan suggests we might instead focus on another key biblical concept: taking care of the immigrant and the refugee, reminding the reader of the unusual focus on the vulnerable in both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.

Michael Coogan (Author), Jeff Zinn (Narrator)

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Summoned at Midnight: A Story of Race and the Last Military Executions at Fort Leavenworth

A lost history of racial discrimination in America's capital punishment system revealed by seventeen lives lived in the Fort Leavenworth military prison Between 1955 and 1961, seventeen condemned soldiers-eight white, nine black-lived together on death row at Fort Leavenworth military prison. All eight of the white soldiers were eventually paroled and returned to their families, spared by high-ranking army officers, the military courts, the White House staff or President Eisenhower himself, sympathetic doctors, and attorneys highly trained in capital litigation. One white master sergeant was serving time for drowning the eight-year-old daughter of an army colonel in Japan. But when the girl's parents forgave him, it sparked a national effort that opened the prison doors and set him free. During the same six-year period, almost every black soldier was hung, lacking the benefits of political connections, expert lawyers, and public support of their white counterparts. By 1960, only the youngest black inmate, John Bennett remained on death row. His battle for clemency was fought over the backdrop of a strengthening civil rights movement, and between two vastly different presidential administrations. With each year came a new legal twist, his freedom and his life hanging in the balance between evolving ideas and realities of race in America. Now, drawing on interviews, transcripts, and rarely-published archival material, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Serrano uncovers the lost history of these unforgettable characters, the scandalous legal maneuvering that reached the doors of the White House, and the intimate history of the racism that pervaded the armed forces long after its integration.

Richard A. Serrano (Author), Jeff Zinn (Narrator)

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A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

For much of his life, historian Howard Zinn has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version taught in schools -- with its emphasis on great men in high places -- to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- its women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers. Here we learn that many of our country's greatest battles -- labor laws, women's rights, racial equality -- were carried out at the grassroots level, against steel-willed resistance. This edition of A People's History of the United States features insightful analysis of some of the most important events in this country in the past one hundred years. Featuring a preface and afterword read by the author himself, this audio continues Howard Zinn's important contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.

Howard Zinn (Author), Jeff Zinn (Narrator)

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The People Speak

To celebrate the millionth copy sold of Howard Zinn's great People's History of the United States, Zinn drew on the words of Americans -- some famous, some little known -- across the range of American history. These words were read by a remarkable cast at an event held at the 92nd Street YMHA in New York City that included James Earl Jones, Alice Walker, Jeff Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfre Woodard, Marisa Tomei, Danny Glover, Myla Pitt, Harris Yulin, and Andre Gregory. From that celebration, this book was born. Collected here under one cover is a brief history of America told through dramatic readings applauding the enduring spirit of dissent. Here in their own words, and interwoven with commentary by Zinn, are Columbus on the Arawaks; Plough Jogger, a farmer and participant in Shays' Rebellion; Harriet Hanson, a Lowell mill worker; Frederick Douglass; Mark Twain; Mother Jones; Emma Goldman; Helen Keller; Eugene V. Debs; Langston Hughes; Genova Johnson Dollinger on a sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan; an interrogation from a 1953 HUAC hearing; Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and member of the Freedom Democratic Party; Malcolm X; and James Lawrence Harrington, a Gulf War resister, among others.

Howard Zinn (Author), Alfre Woodard, Alice Walker, Andre Gregory, Danny Glover, Harris Yulin, Howard Zinn, James Earl Jones, Jeff Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, Marisa Tomei, Myla Pitt (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Jeff Zinn