Political Advocacy Audiobooks | Politics

The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society

Brought to you by Penguin. A major reappraisal, by the Nobel-prizewinning economist, of the relationship between capitalism and freedom Despite its manifest failures, the narrative of neoliberalism retains its grip on the public mind and the policies of governments all over the world. By this narrative, less regulation and more ‘animal spirits’ capitalism produces not only greater prosperity, but more freedom for individuals in society - and is therefore morally better. But, in The Road to Freedom Stiglitz asks, whose freedom are we – should we be – thinking about? What happens when one person’s freedom comes at the expense of another’s? Should the freedoms of corporations be allowed to impinge upon those of individuals in the ways they now do? Taking on giants of neoliberalism such as Hayek and Friedman and examining how public opinion is formed, Stiglitz reclaims the language of freedom from the right to show that far from ‘free’ – unregulated – markets promoting growth and enterprise, they in fact reduce it, lessening economic opportunities for majorities and siphoning wealth from the many to the few – both individuals and countries. He shows how neoliberal economics and its implied moral system have impacted our legal and social freedoms in surprising ways, from property and intellectual rights, to education and social media. Stiglitz’s eye, as always, is on how we might create the true human flourishing which should be the great aim of our economic and social system, and offers an alternative to that prevailing today. The Road to Freedom offers a powerful re-evaluation of democracy, economics and what constitutes a good society—and provides a roadmap of how we might achieve it. ©2024 Joseph Stiglitz (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Joseph Stiglitz (Author), Paul Boehmer, TBD (Narrator)

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You Can't Always Say What You Want: The Paradox of Free Speech

The freedom to think what you want and to say what you think has always generated a pushback of regulation and censorship. This raises the thorny question: to what extent does free speech actually endanger speech protection? This book examines today's calls for speech legislation and places it into historical perspective, using fascinating examples from the past 200 years, to explain the historical context of laws regulating speech. Over time, the freedom to speak has grown, the ways in which we communicate have evolved due to technology, and our ideas about speech protection have been challenged as a result. Now more than ever, we are living in a free speech paradox: powerful speakers weaponize their rights in order to silence those less-powerful speakers who oppose them. By understanding how this situation has developed, we can stand up to these threats to the freedom of speech.

Dennis Baron (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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Cyborg: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

This introduction to cyborg theory provides a critical vantage point for analyzing the claims around emerging technologies like automation, robots, and AI. Cyborg analyzes and reframes popular and scholarly conversations about cyborgs from the perspective of feminist cyborg theory. Drawing on their combined decades of training, teaching, and research in the social sciences, design, and engineering education, Laura Forlano and Danya Glabau introduce an approach called critical cyborg literacy. Critical cyborg literacy foregrounds power dynamics and pays attention to the ways that social and cultural factors such as gender, race, and disability shape how technology is imagined, developed, used, and resisted. Forlano and Glabau offer critical cyborg literacy as a way of thinking through questions about the relationship between humanity and technology. Cyborg examines whether modern technologies make us all cyborgs-if we consider, for instance, the fact that we use daily technologies at work, have technologies embedded into our bodies in health care applications, or use technology to critically explore possibilities as artists, designers, activists, and creators. Lastly, Cyborg offers perspectives from critical race, feminist, and disability thinkers to help chart a path forward for cyborg theory in the twenty-first century.

Danya Glabau, Laura Forlano (Author), Teri Schnaubelt (Narrator)

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The Fire Next Time

Brought to you by Penguin. 'A seminal meditation on race by one of our greatest writers' Barack Obama 'We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation' James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice. 'Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle ... all presented in searing, brilliant prose' The New York Times Book Review 'Baldwin writes with great passion ... it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of New York and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy' Sunday Times 'The great poet-prophet of the civil rights movement ... his seminal work' Guardian ©1963 James Baldwin (P)2024 Penguin Audio

James Baldwin (Author), Jesse L. Martin, TBD (Narrator)

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The Radical Imagination of Black Women: Ambition, Politics, and Power

Including interviews with Black women holding political office at the national, state, and local levels, as well as focus group data, The Radical Imagination of Black Women challenges political science's current approach to political ambition by exploring how Black women decide to seek political office. Pearl K. Ford Dowe argues that ambition for Black women cannot be measured only by political candidacies and ascents of the political chain of power. Black women are uniquely positioned within their communities to influence politics and public policy, which stems from unique variables of socialization, gender and racial identity, and marginalization that shape the political attitudes of Black women. Thus, Dowe asserts that Black women's political ambition often manifests outside formal politics, in activism and community building, a process that is linked to a wider radical vision for a full democracy. This is ambition that occurs in a specific context of marginalization, and both motivation and the conditions surrounding such motivation are critical to understanding the full range of Black women's political work. By focusing on Black women's experiences in elite politics, The Radical Imagination of Black Women is a much-needed intervention in the literature on electoral ambition, women in politics, and candidates and elections.

Pearl K. Ford Dowe (Author), L. Malaika Cooper (Narrator)

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The Incarcerations

The world’s largest democracy is facing the greatest challenge since the end of British colonial rule in 1947. The Incarcerations pulls back the curtain on Indian democracy to tell the remarkable and chilling story of the Bhima Koregaon case, in which 16 human rights defenders (the BK-16) – professors, lawyers, journalists, poets – have been imprisoned, without credible evidence and without trial, as Maoist terrorists. Alpa Shah unravels how these alleged terrorists were charged with inciting violence at a year’s day commemoration in 2018, accused of waging a war against the Indian state, and plotting to kill the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Expertly leading us through the case, Shah exposes some of the world’s most shocking revelations of cyber warfare research, which show not only hacking of emails and mobile phones of the BK-16, but also implantation of the electronic evidence that was used to incarcerate them. Through the life histories of the BK-16, Shah dives deep into the issues they fought for and tells the story of India’s three main minorities – Adivasi, Dalits and Muslims – and what the search for democracy entails for them. Essential and urgent, The Incarcerations reveals how this case is a bellwether for the collapse of democracy in India, as for the first time in the nation’s history there is a multi-pronged, coordinated attack on key defenders of various pillars of democracy. In so doing, Shah shows that democracy today must be not only about protecting freedom of expression and democratic institutions, but also about supporting and safeguarding the social movements that question our global inequalities.

Alpa Shah (Author), Tania Rodrigues (Narrator)

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Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978

A new history of the American Jewish relationship with Isreal focused on its most urgent and sensitive issue: the question of Palestinian rights American Jews began debating Palestinian rights issues even before Israel's founding in 1948. Geoffrey Levin recovers the voices of American Jews who, in the early decades of Israel's existence, called for an honest reckoning with the moral and political plight of Palestinian Sephardic roots, a former Yiddish journalist, anti-Zionist Reform rabbis, and young left-wing Zionist activists, felt drawn to support Palestinian rights by their understanding of Jewish history, identity, and ethics. They sometimes worked with mainstream American Jewish leaders who feared that ignoring Palestinian rights could foster antisemitism, leading them to press Israeli officials for reform. But Israeli diplomats viewed any American Jewish interest in Palestinian affairs with deep suspicion, provoking a series of quiet confrontations that ultimately kept Palestinian rights off the American Jewish agenda up to the present era. In reconstructing this hidden history, Levin lays the groundwork for more forthright debates over Palestinian rights issues, American Jewish identity, and the U.S.-Israel relationship more broadly.

Geoffrey Levin (Author), Jonathan Todd Ross (Narrator)

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Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire

Gaza, home to two million people, continues to face suffocating conditions imposed by Israel. This distinctive anthology imagines what the future of Gaza could be, while reaffirming the critical role of Gaza in Palestinian identity, history, and struggle for liberation. Light in Gaza is a seminal, moving, and wide-ranging anthology of Palestinian writers and artists. It constitutes a collective effort to organize and center Palestinian voices in the ongoing struggle. As political discourse shifts toward futurism as a means of reimagining a better way of living, beyond the violence and limitations of colonialism, Light in Gaza is an urgent and powerful intervention into an important political moment.

Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, Mike Merryman-Lotze (Author), Amin El Gamal, Hanne Rickert, TBD (Narrator)

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On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy

The effort to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn't come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism. In On Disinformation, Lee McIntyre shows how the war on facts began, and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society. Drawing on his twenty years of experience as a scholar of science denial, McIntyre explains how autocrats wield disinformation to manipulate a populace and deny obvious realities, why the best way to combat disinformation is to disrupt its spread, and most importantly, how we can win the war on truth. McIntyre goes through the history of strategic denialism to show how we arrived at this precarious political moment and identifies the creators, amplifiers, and believers of disinformation. On Disinformation lays out ten everyday practical steps that we can take as ordinary citizens-from resisting polarization to pressuring our Congresspeople to regulate social media-as well as the important steps our government (if we elect the right leaders) must take. On Disinformation empowers us to save our republic from autocracy before it is too late.

Lee Mcintyre (Author), Brian P. Craig (Narrator)

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India's Struggle for Independence

India's Struggle For Independence presents a detailed outlook on the struggle for Indian Independence in a new analytical framework. Designed for ardent history enthusiasts, India's Struggle For Independence is one of the most exhaustive and precise account of the struggle of Indian Independence ever written in the literary world. Written and edited by five expert authors, it presents a detailed outlook on one of the most important periods in Indian history. The facts and details provided in this book have been gathered from oral and written sources, and various other primary sources have been used along with years of intense research. Written with a very concise approach, it is a one of a kind book that details the intricacies of the Indian Independence struggle. The struggle for Indian Independence took a long time and was something that affected the whole country. Every state in the country boasted of some kind of revolt – minor or major during this period. Numerous revolutionaries throughout the country came together in their efforts to fight against the British rule and set their country free. Few of the chapters in the book are The Fight to Secure Press Freedom, Foundation of the Congress: The Myth, World War I and Indian Nationalism: The Ghadar, An Economic Critique of Colonialism, Peasant Movements and Uprisings after 1857, The Non-Cooperation Movement—1920-1922, The Gathering Storm-1927-1929, Civil Rebellions and Tribal Uprisings, and many more. India's Struggle For Independence takes the reader on a journey across India as she was craving for her Independence. This book starts at the very first revolt of 1857 under the guidance of Mangal Pandey, from Rani Lakshmi Bai’s innate passion to free her country, Subhash Chandra Bose’s unmatched charisma and aggressive tactics, to Mahatma Gandhi’s famous civil disobedience and non-cooperation movement, to the final victory in 1947 when the British Raj finally came to an end. The book reflects a coherent narrative as it incorporates the existing historiographical advances and yet provides an utterly new and clear view of this period in Indian history.

Bipan Chandra (Author), Derek Denzil (Narrator)

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The Poverty of the World: Rediscovering the Poor at Home and Abroad, 1941-1968

In The Poverty of the World, Sheyda Jahanbani brings together the histories of United States foreign relations and domestic politics to explain why, during a period of unprecedented affluence, Americans rediscovered poverty and supported major policy initiative to combat it. Revisiting a moment of triumph for American liberals in the 1940s, Jahanbani shows how the United States's newfound role as a global superpower prompted novel ideas among liberal thinkers about how to address poverty and generated new urgency for trying to do so. Their sense of responsibility about deploying American knowledge and wealth as a beneficent force in the world, produced such foreign aid programs as the Peace Corps. Drawing on a wide variety of archival material, Jahanbani reinterprets the lives and work of prominent liberal figures in postwar American social politics to show the global origins of their ideas. By tracing how American liberals invented the problem of 'global poverty' and executed a war against it, The Poverty of the World sheds new light on the domestic impacts of the Cold War, the global ambitions of American liberalism, and the way in which key intellectuals and policymakers worked to develop an alternative vision of United States empire in the decades after World War II.

Sheyda F. A. Jahanbani (Author), Teri Schnaubelt (Narrator)

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Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics

While we can all recall images of Martin Luther King Jr. giving his 'I Have a Dream' speech in front of a massive crowd at Lincoln Memorial, few of us remember the man who organized this watershed nonviolent protest in eight short weeks: Bayard Rustin. This was far from Rustin's first foray into the fight for civil rights. As a world-traveling pacifist, he brought Gandhi's protest techniques to the forefront of US civil rights demonstrations, helped build the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led the fight for economic justice, and played a deeply influential role in the life of Dr. King by helping to mold him into an international symbol of nonviolent resistance. Rustin's legacy touches many areas of contemporary life-from civil resistance to violent uprisings, democracy to socialism, and criminal justice reform to war resistance. Despite these achievements, Rustin was often relegated to the background. He was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. This volume draws a full picture of Bayard Rustin: a gay, pacifist, socialist political radical who changed the course of US history and set a precedent for future civil rights activism, from LGBTQ+ Pride to Black Lives Matter.

Michael G. Long (Author), William Andrew Quinn (Narrator)

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Political Advocacy Audiobooks in Politics