Social Science Audiobooks | Non-Fiction

"In the firehouse the men not only live and eat with each other, they play sports together, go off to drink together, help repair one another's houses and, most importantly, share terrifying risks; their loyalties to each other must, by the demands of the dangers they face, be instinctive and absolute." So writes David Halberstam, one of America's most distinguished reporters and historians in this stunning book about Engine 40, Ladder 35 - one of the firehouses hardest hit in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Towers. On the morning of September 11, 2001, two rigs carrying 13 men set out from this firehouse, located on the west side of Manhattan near Lincoln Center; twelve of the men would never return. Firehouse takes us to the very epicenter of the tragedy. We watch the day unfold, the men called to duty, while their families wait anxiously for news of them. In addition we come to understand the culture of the firehouse itself, why gifted men do this and why in so many instances they are anxious to follow in their fathers' footsteps and serve in so dangerous a profession - why more than anything else, it is not just a job, but a calling as well. Firehouse is journalism-as-history at its best. The story of what happens when one small institution gets caught in apocalyptic day, it is a book that will move readers as few others have in our time.

David Halberstam (Author), Mel Foster (Narrator)

Audiobook

Navigating Nature Naturally

Brenda Peterson finds her spirituality in the soulfulness, humility, and forgiveness of the natural world. With a voice as gentle as her heart, she shares her first mystical encounter with the spirit of a river, and points the way to a sacredness grounded in the natural world, the wisdom of women, and the love of family.

Brenda Peterson (Author), Justine Willis Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Bitch in the House: Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage

Despite more power and choices than ever before, women are still angry -- that's not necessarily a bad thing, as anger is what continues to open the door for change. In this collection, 15 women speak boldly and passionately about choices they've made -- about sex, children, love and work -- and explore what's working and what is not. Their essays -- always provocative, honest, witty and wise -- are the culmination of the lessons of the past two decades, the 'me' years and the therapy years, the years that have taught women to express themselves and acknowledge their needs. As celebratory as they are critical, these brilliant essays reflect the truth about life. Audio contains the following essays, written and read by the contributors: Introduction -- Cathi Hanauer Getting the Milk for Free -- Veronica Chambers Crossing to Safety -- Jen Marshall Moving In. Moving Out. Moving On. -- Sarah Miller Papa Don't Preach -- Kerry Herlihy I Do. Not.: Why I Won't Marry -- Catherine Newman Killing the Puritan Within -- Kate Christensen My Mother's Ring: Caught Between Two Families -- Helen Schulman Attila the Honey I'm Home -- Kristin van Ogtrop The Myth of Co-Parenting: How It Was Supposed to Be. How It Was. -- Hope Edelman Daddy Dearest: What Happens When He Does More Than His Half? -- Laurie Abraham Crossing the Line in the Sand: How Mad Can Mother Get? -- Elissa Schappell Married at 46: The Agony and the Ecstacy -- Nancy Wartik The Fat Lady Sings -- Natalie Kusz What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude.The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge. -- Vivian Gornick

Cathi Hanauer (Author), Cathi Hanauer (Narrator)

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The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle

Internationally best-selling author of Last of the Amazons, Gates of Fire and Tides of War, Steven Pressfield delivers a guide to inspire and support those who struggle to express their creativity. Pressfield believes that "resistance" is the greatest enemy, and he offers many unique and helpful ways to overcome it.

Steven Pressfield (Author), George Guidall (Narrator)

Audiobook

Feminism and The Future of Women

Since the time of the abolitionists, no movement has so politicized social life in the United States as feminism. Responsible for wide-ranging legislation, such as women's right to vote and the right to an abortion, feminists have fought their way to the center of the country's political dialogue and made themselves a major presence there. But the road to such influence has not been easy. From the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment to the continuing debates about abortion, feminists have often found themselves in the middle of the country's most hotly contested disputes. They have won many allies, but also many enemies. Yet even under the most intense political pressure, feminism has continued to grow. It has evolved from a women's movement concerned with the rights of mostly white, middle- and upper-class women to an ideology that embraces women from communities of color to, most recently, a movement of international solidarity that pleads the cause of oppressed women around the world, from those brutalized by the Taliban in Afghanistan to teenagers sold into slavery in the East Asian sex trade. Feminists have long called attention to historical injustice and unfair labor practices. Now feminism has reached a position where it must decide not only how to redress the discriminations of the past but how best to shape the future of women.

Estelle Freedman (Author), Richard Davidson, Richard M. Davidson (Narrator)

Audiobook

My Life Among the Serial Killers

Over the course of twenty-five years, Dr. Helen Morrison has profiled more than eighty serial killers around the world. What she learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious criminals known to man. Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is much more than that. She is one of the country's leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in a room with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers' psyches in ways no profiler before ever has. In My Life Among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims' body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; England's Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their "House of Horrors"; and Brazil's deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade. Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims -- and the spouses and parents of the killers -- to gain a deeper understanding of the killer's environment and the public persona he adopts. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H. H. Holmes of the late ninteenth century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties. Through it all, Dr. Morrison has been on a mission to discover the reasons why serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you.

Dr. Helen Morrison, Harold Goldberg, Helen Morrison, Helen Morrison, M.D. (Author), Dr. Helen Morrison, Helen Morrison, Helen Morrison, M.D. (Narrator)

Audiobook

Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation

Cokie Roberts's #1 New York Times bestseller We Are Our Mothers Daughters examined the nature of women's roles throughout history and led USA Today to praise her as a "custodian of time-honored values." Her second bestseller, From This Day Forward, written with her husband, Steve Roberts, described American marriages throughout history. Now Cokie returns with Founding Mothers, an intimate look at the passionate women whose tireless pursuits on behalf of their families and country proved just as crucial to the forging of a new nation as the rebellion that established it. Roberts reveals the often surprising stories of these fascinating women, bringing to life the everyday trials of individuals like Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Eliza Pinckney, Mary Bartlett and Martha Washington -- proving that without our exemplary women, the new country might have never survived. Social history at its best, Founding Mothers unveils the determination, creative insight and passion of the other patriots, the women who raised our nation. Cokie Roberts proves beyond doubt that like every generation of American women that has followed, the founding mothers used the unique gifts of their gender -- courage, pluck, sadness, joy, energy, grace, sensitivity and humor -- to do what women do best, put one foot in front of the other in remarkable circumstances, and carry on.

Cokie Roberts (Author), Cokie Roberts (Narrator)

Audiobook

Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, E

In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant-better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future. With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.

James Surowiecki (Author), Grover Gardner (Narrator)

Audiobook

Queer Eye For the Straight Guy: The Fab 5's Guide to Looking Better, Cooking Better, Dressing Better

Imagine this: Five eminently stylish and hilariously witty gay men -- authoritative experts in food and wine, grooming, decorating, fashion, and culture -- invade your life, assess your strengths and weaknesses, and, in the course of a day, make you better dressed, better groomed, better mannered, and a better cook, living in a better home. All of this is painless (unless you have a really egregious body-hair situation), liberating, and downright fun. This is what Queer Eye for the Straight Guy does each week on one of the hottest TV shows in memory, as the Fab 5 -- Ted Allen, Kyan Douglas, Thom Filicia, Carson Kressley, and Jai Rodriguez -- turn an everyman frog into an every-girl's-dream prince. And this is what the book offers: the essential "make better" advice from each of the Fab 5. Just like the show, the book focuses on easy but lasting lifestyle transformation -- the tasks, the projects, the modest purchases, and, most important, the new attitudes that immediately make a noticeable difference. From Kyan's instructions on how often to wash your hair to Carson's explanation of why shirts are the new ties, from Ted's strategies for ordering wine and Thom's suggestions on a better bathroom to Jai's hints on shaking hands, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is filled with clear, direct advice on the issues that confront every man. But Queer Eye doesn't try to make you dress like Carson or dance like Jai; it's about teaching you how to refine your own personal style, without throwing away your entire closet and buying a whole new everything. It's about helping you realize the best expression of yourself -- the real you. Queer Eye introduces men to the rewards that women -- and a lot of gay men -- have long reaped by thinking about the day-to-day details that make them look better, feel better, and get more out of life. Many straight men have long felt that these subjects are not for them. Nothing could be sillier. In this audiobook, the Fab 5 sets them straight (so to speak).

Carson Kressley, Jai Rodriguez, Kyan Douglas, Ted Allen, Thom Filicia (Author), Carson Kressley, Jai Rodriguez, Kyan Douglas, Ted Allen, Thom Filicia (Narrator)

Audiobook

Brothers in Arms

Anthony Walton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Author), Peter Francis James, Richard Allen (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values

If you believe children should be seduced into warped sexual behavior by the Gay Elite, if you think confessed murderers should be set free by defense attorneys who know how to wield the race card, if you feel promiscuous gay men should be empowered to spread AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, don’t read this book. But if you’ve always suspected that factions on the Left are trying to destroy the values that define our civilization, this book proves it. Through the pages of The Death of Right and Wrong, author, activist, and pundit Tammy Bruce takes you inside the chilling world of the Left—a place where morals and decency have been turned on their heads and the crisp distinction between Right and Wrong has been blurred into a mushy, gray mess. In this world, the Gay Elite exploit our children—under the guise of tolerance and education—to satisfy their sexual obsessions. In this world, the Black Elite laud convicted murderers as community heroes and award-winning “artists.” In this world, the Feminist Elite fawn over a woman who mercilessly killed all five of her children. And much more that will offend your sense of decency and threaten your basic values. Ms. Bruce smashes the facades of “Tolerance,” “Understanding,” and other Leftist slogans to reveal the ugly truth of their agenda. As a gay activist and former president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization of Women, she witnessed firsthand the Left’s attempts to undermine our millennia-old code of morals and values, aided by politically biased media and academia. And if the news headlines of today are any indication, they’re winning the culture war. Unless we act now, we are doomed at the hands of special interest groups on the Left who want nothing more than to undermine our ability to judge right from wrong in order to foist their own selfish, anything-goes society on the rest of us. This book reveals what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and what we can do to restore decency in our society. You’ll discover powerful tools in these pages to help you understand the psychology of the Left—what makes them tick and, more importantly, how to stop them from eroding our values completely. Full of controversial opinions and countless examples ripped from the headlines, The Death of Right and Wrong is a powerful, eye-opening book that you won’t want to be without.

Tammy Bruce (Author), Tammy Bruce (Narrator)

Audiobook

Are You There Alone?

On June 20, 2001 Andrea Yates drowned her five children, Noah, John, Paul, Luke, and Mary, in their suburban Houston home. Suzanne O'Malley was visiting a Dallas suburb when local news of the drownings broke live from the crime scene. Each of the people and places in those early broadcasts became intimately known to her as she pursued the story. In addition to Rusty Yates and other close friends of the couple, O'Malley broke the story of the secretive preacher named Michael Woroniecki who influenced Andrea Yates. Andrea Yates is currently serving out her sentence in the Skyview Unit of Rusk Penitentiary in Rusk, Texas. She will not be eligible for parole until the year 2041 when she will be 77 years old. At the time of her imprisonment in April 2002, Andrea Yates had still not been diagnosed accurately or treated with proper medication. After being taken off medication in prison, she fell into deep psychosis in January 2003. Are You There Alone? will show how madness, death penalty politics, a narrow reading of criminal law, medical misjudgment, and religious delusion infect an all-American family. It has a strong point of view and advocacy. O'Malley believes that Andrea Yates is a victim herself.

Susan O'Malley, Suzanne O'Malley, Suzanne O'malley (Author), Becky Ann Baker, Becky Ann Baker (Narrator)

Audiobook

Social Science Audiobooks in Non-Fiction