Non-Fiction Audiobooks

Hope I Get Old Before I Die: How rock’s greatest generation kept going to the end

Brought to you by Penguin. From the author of Abbey Road comes the story of how enduring rock icons like Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen and many more have remained in the ever changing music game. When Paul McCartney closed Live Aid in July 1985 we thought he was rock's Grand Old Man. He was forty-three years old. As the forty years since have shown he - and many others of his generation - were just getting started. This was the time when live performance took over from records. The big names of the 60s and 70s exploited the age of spectacle that Live Aid had ushered in to enjoy the longest lap of honour in the history of humanity, continuing to go strong long after everyone else had retired. Hence this is a story without precedent, a story in which Elton John plays a royal funeral, Mick Jagger gets a knighthood, Bob Dylan picks up the Nobel Prize, the Beatles become, if anything, bigger than the Beatles and it's beginning to look as though all of the above will, thanks to the march of technology, be playing Las Vegas for ever. ©2024 David Hepworth (P)2024 Penguin Audio

David Hepworth (Author), David Hepworth, TBD (Narrator)

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Why Not All Men?: How Violence Against Women is Every Man's Issue, and How You Can Help

Brought to you by Penguin. The paradigm-shifting book about men's violence against women, how it affects us all, and how men are the only ones that can stop it. Until now, violence against women has been seen as a women's issue that some good men help out with but Jackson Katz argues that, in fact, it is a men's issue and every man has a role to play in preventing it. As the world-leading writer, speaker and educator on men's violence, Jackson unpicks the causes of gender violence and shows how we can dismantle them, revealing a path to a brighter future. There are sections on: - The triad of men's violence that affects us all: women, other men and themselves, through suicide - The importance of inviting rather than inciting men to act out of responsibility rather than guilt - Men's responsibility as leaders and role models for young men - The Bystander Approach: how we can all speak up against misogyny safely and effectively. In a world where the headlines are continually filled with stories of sexual violence and misogynistic hate WHY NOT ALL MEN? is an urgent and vital read for anyone who wants to make the world a safer place. ©2024 Dr Jackson Katz (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Dr Jackson Katz (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Playing Dead: A very personal meditation journey

Brought to you by Penguin. From Hollywood star of Misfits and The Umbrella Academy and host of hit podcast The Earth Locker, Robert Sheehan, comes his heartfelt journey to inner peace. Meditation is a whole dimension without time, a profound reminder of the eternal being of You. Many of us often feel challenged by the question of what gives our lives true meaning. What are we searching for? How do we know we are on the right path? In Playing Dead, Robert Sheehan shares intimate reflections on his own search for purpose, looking back at this journey so far and sharing the lessons he has learnt along the way. Meditation is at the heart of Robert's route to awakening and here he reveals how we can welcome practice into our daily lives to nurture a quiet mind and content heart. In a world where our conscious attention is constantly up for grabs, Playing Dead shows how we can retain our power and give our minds the rest they need. ©2024 Robert Sheehan (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Robert Sheehan (Author), Robert Sheehan, TBD (Narrator)

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Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir

One month before his college graduation, Paul Rousseau is accidentally shot in the head by his roommate and best friend. At some point in the course of Paul and Mark's friendship, Mark acquired-legally and with required permits-five firearms. Those weapons lived with them in their college apartment. It was a non-issue for the two best friends. They were inseparable. They were twenty-two-year-old boys at the height of their college experience, unaware that everything was about to change forever. The bullet ripped through two walls before it struck Paul's skull. Mark had accidentally pulled the trigger while in the other room and-frightened for his own future-delayed getting treatment for Paul, who miraculously remained conscious the entire time. In vivid detail, Friendly Fire brings us into the world of both the shooting itself and its surgical counterpoint-the dark spaces of survival in the face of a traumatic brain injury and into the paranoid, isolating, dehumanizing maw of personal injury cases. Friendly Fire is the story of a friendship-both its formation and its destruction. Through phenomenal writing and gripping detail, Paul reveals a compelling and inspirational story that speaks to much of contemporary American life.

Paul Rousseau (Author), Michael Crouch, TBD (Narrator)

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Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour's Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness i

The unforgettable account of Del Seymour, who overcame 18 years of homelessness and addiction to become one of the most respected advocates in San Francisco In the Mayor of Tenderloin, journalist Alison Owings slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism surrounding San Francisco's Tenderloin to reveal a harrowing and life-affirming account of Del Seymour-whose addiction led him into eighteen years of homelessness, pimping, and drug dealing. Once sober, he started Tenderloin Walking Tours and later Code Tenderloin, the remarkable organization teaching homeless, recovering addicts, sex workers, dealers, ex-felons, and other marginalized people how to get and keep a job. Owings traces Del's story and those in his orbit: from his daughters, sobriety buddy, and ex-girlfriend, to a police captain and a psychiatric social worker, housing activists and corporate philanthropists, and Del's Code Tenderloin students. In the Tenderloin, in a city known for its beauty and currently infamous for its divide between haves and have-nots, Owings highlights how Del gives back to people struggling with the same daunting setbacks-including a criminal record-he once faced. Honest and compelling, The Mayor of Tenderloin follows homelessness in one of America's toughest neighborhoods as it was lived-in the words of someone who lived it and is now fighting to solve it.

Alison Owings (Author), Jeremy Durm, Kevin Jasper, TBD (Narrator)

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I Am Maroon: The True Story of an American Political Prisoner

A cinematic memoir of justice and redemption that traces a former Black Panther's tumultuous life from gang member to Black liberation leader. Russell Shoatz was a gang member from age 11, battling for territory and dignity amid the white flight of 1950s Philadelphia. But at 23, after hearing Malcolm X speak on a street corner in Harlem, his life changed course. Shoatz would become a lifelong crusader for justice, a soldier in the most militant units of the Black Liberation Army, and a Black Panther fighting the notorious Frank Rizzo and his Blue Guards. The fight turned increasingly violent, and as one of the "Philly Five," Shoatz was convicted to life in prison after a coordinated attack on a police station, which left one officer dead. The prison walls, however, could not deter Shoatz's battle for personal and collective freedom. He escaped maximum security facilities twice, making him a living legend, and endowed him with the moniker "Maroon," once used to honor runaways from plantations. He survived 22 years in solitary confinement, prompting an international campaign for his freedom. And he radicalized his prison communities, working to resolve racial tensions, and collectively organize against mistreatment by guards. In October 2021, after 49 years in prison, Maroon was released into hospice care, reuniting briefly with his children before he passed away. But for nine years before his death, he worked furiously with Sri Lankan writer Kanya D'Almeida, whom he recognized as a comrade despite their vastly different backgrounds, to record his life's work in print. I Am Maroon charts a life of dizzying intrigue, a real-life Shawshank Redemption, set during the height of the struggle for Black liberation. With an unforgettable voice and a personality that comes off the page, Maroon reminds us that we too are capable of radical change, and leaves us a blueprint for how we might dedicate our lives and minds to the ongoing fight for freedom.

Russell Shoatz (Author), Avery Kidd Waddell, Kanya D'almeida, TBD (Narrator)

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The Sing Sing Files: One Journalist, Six Innocent Men, and a Twenty-Year Fight for Justice

Dan Slepian (Author), Dan Slepian, Daniel Slepian, TBD (Narrator)

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The Darwinian Trap: The Hidden Evolutionary Forces That Explain Our World (and Threaten Our Future)

A provocative exploration of how humans are wired to seek short-term success at the expense of long-term survival-an evolutionary 'glitch" that explains everything from toxic workplaces to climate change In this eye-opening work, entrepreneur and philosopher Kristian Rönn argues that today's biggest challenges-climate change, fake news, artificial intelligence, even terrible bosses-are less the work of 'bad people' doing 'bad things' than the product of fundamental evolutionary forces. These forces compel us to act-but often in short-sighted ways that disadvantage others and imperil our own future prosperity. Rönn calls these deeply rooted impulses "Darwinian demons.' Left unchecked, their consequences will grow in magnitude as the power of technology accelerates. In short, evolution has set a trap for us. How can we avoid it? Rönn, who previously worked at the Future of Humanity Institute (the intellectual hub that has produced groundbreaking books including Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom and The Precipice by Toby Ord), shows that we must learn to cooperate in new ways if we are to surmount these Darwinian optimization traps, whether in the workplace or to solve our biggest existential threats. Evolution may be to blame for the trap-but humans need not fall for it. Our salvation, he writes, will involve the creation of new systems that understand, track, and manage what humankind values most. Bold, brilliant, and ultimately optimistic, The Darwinian Trap is a new lens on humanity's past, present, and future-and a call to rethink our priorities for the sake of generations to come.

Kristian Rönn (Author), Jamie Renell, TBD (Narrator)

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When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer: Reflections on Collective Liberation

An esteemed activist invites us to consider the complex idea of abolition as much more than a strategy or a set of tactics-at a deeper level, abolition is an entire political framework, culture, and orientation Blending history and political theory and weaving in examples from literature, social movements, and his personal life, this book is a useful resource and primer for those interested in fighting for social justice. Guided by questions like what is freedom?, how do we get free?, and what are the freedom dreams that encourage us and drive us forward?, esteemed activist Bill Ayers explores the concept of freedom in eight essays: - Freedom/Unfreedom takes off from the Black Freedom Movement in the 20th Century as a template for social justice movements that followed, and begins to illuminate the idea of freedom in light of what folks come together to oppose. - Freedom's Paradox offers examples of a contradiction (from Frederick Douglass to the French Resistance to the Panthers)-even, or especially, in the most dire circumstances, people testify to "being free" at the moment they identify and unite to oppose unfreedom. - Social Freedom/Individual Liberty directly takes on the link between the individual and the social when freedom is the question. - Freedom, Anarchism, and Socialism takes off from the idea that freedom without socialism is predation and exploitation, and that socialism without freedom is bondage and subjugation. - Freedom, Truth, and Repair considers reparations as a necessary step in any honest attempt toward authentic reconciliation. - Organizing Freedom is a primer on organizing, strategy, and tactics for freedom fighters. - Teach Freedom considers what an education for free people entails. - Freedom and Abolition connects an enriched understanding of what freedom entails with an embrace of abolitionist politics.

Bill Ayers (Author), Bill Ayers, TBD (Narrator)

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Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis

An urgent investigation of student debt in America revealing the corrupt systems, rotten policies, and bad actors that have created a $1.7 trillion crisis. College costs more today than ever and is worth less. Tuition at public colleges has more than tripled in the past 50 years. Over the same period student debt has grown from virtually nothing to more than $1.7 trillion, second only to home mortgages. Skyrocketing student-loan burdens are leading an entire generation to put off the traditional milestones of adulthood: buying homes, getting married, starting families, and saving for retirement. The burden weighs heavier on women and black Americans, and with almost 10 percent of student debtors now over the age of 60, it is a crisis no longer limited to the young. Ryann Liebenthal’s Burdened tells the maddening story of how the power plays of legislators and presidents, the commodification of higher ed, and the rapacious practices of for-profit colleges and private lenders have created today’s student-debt lava pit. As the notion of student-loan cancellation percolates into the political mainstream, Liebenthal offers a deeply researched, sweeping narrative of our broken system. Rather than give in to despair, she boldly charts a way out, offering hopeful solutions to this seemingly unfixable problem.

Ryann Liebenthal (Author), Eileen Stevens, Tbd (Narrator)

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The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them

Brought to you by Penguin. Richly imaginative and powerfully empathetic, an intimate portrait of five remarkable Black men, and a meditation on race, estrangement and the search for home. In the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger. Outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien. One who remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. One who is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a type. What kind of performance is required for a person to survive this condition? And what happens beneath the mask? In answer, Ekow Eshun conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira Aldridge: nineteenth century actor and playwright. Matthew Henson: polar explorer. Frantz Fanon: psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm X: activist leader. Justin Fashanu: million-pound footballer. Each a trailblazer in his field. Each haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each reaching for a better future. Ekow Eshun tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. And he locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean. As he moves through this landscape, he maps its thematic contours and fault lines, uncovering traces of the monstrous and the fantastic, of exile and escape, of conflict and vulnerability, and of the totemic central figure of the stranger. ©2024 Ekow Eshun (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Ekow Eshun (Author), Ako Mitchell, Ekow Eshun, TBD (Narrator)

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Nexus: FROM THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SAPIENS

Brought to you by Penguin. The story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world from the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Sapiens. For the last 100,000 years, humans have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive? NEXUS considers how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age through the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. NEXUS explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and of rediscovering our shared humanity. Praise for Yuval Noah Harari ‘The great thinker of our age’ The Times on 21 Lessons for the 21st Century ‘Interesting and provocative’ Barack Obama on Sapiens ‘One of my favourite writers and thinkers’ Natalie Portman on Sapiens ‘Sweeps the cobwebs out of your brain . . . Radiates power and clarity’ Sunday Times on Sapiens ‘It altered how I view our species and our world’ Guardian on Sapiens ©2024 Yuval Noah Harari (P) 2024 Penguin Audio

Yuval Noah Harari (Author), TBD, Vidish Athavale (Narrator)

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