Political Advocacy Audiobooks | Politics

Should doctors be allowed to help terminally ill people kill themselves? How should a humane society respond to those who are suffering terribly at the end of life? What laws are being proposed and what will be the consequences for dying people, for healthcare services and for society as a whole? John Wyatt has worked as a frontline doctor in the UK National Health Service for more than 30 years and brings his clinical, ethical and personal experience to this crucial debate. Assisted Dying is a concise, readable and authoritative guide to a vital question of our times. Assisted Dying Audiobook published by Monkeynut Audiobooks monkeynutuk.com

John Wyatt (Author), John Wyatt (Narrator)

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Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America

Explores the Black activist's ideas and political strategies, highlighting their relevance for tackling modern social issues including voter suppression, police violence, and economic inequality. "We have a long fight and this fight is not mine alone, but you are not free whether you are white or black, until I am free."-Fannie Lou Hamer A blend of social commentary, biography, and intellectual history, Until I Am Free is a manifesto for anyone committed to social justice. The book challenges us to listen to a working-poor and disabled Black woman activist and intellectual of the civil rights movement as we grapple with contemporary concerns around race, inequality, and social justice. Award-winning historian and New York Times best-selling author Keisha N. Blain situates Fannie Lou Hamer as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks and demonstrates how her ideas remain salient for a new generation of activists committed to dismantling systems of oppression in the United States and across the globe. Despite her limited material resources and the myriad challenges she endured as a Black woman living in poverty in Mississippi, Hamer committed herself to making a difference in the lives of others. She refused to be sidelined in the movement and refused to be intimidated by those of higher social status and with better jobs and education. In these pages, Hamer's words and ideas take center stage, allowing us all to hear the activist's voice and deeply engage her words, as though we had the privilege to sit right beside her. More than 40 years since Hamer's death in 1977, her words still speak truth to power, laying bare the faults in American society and offering valuable insights on how we might yet continue the fight to help the nation live up to its core ideals of "equality and justice for all."

Keisha N. Blain (Author), Tyra Kennedy (Narrator)

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In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony

How China used a network of surveillance to intern over a million people and produce a system of control previously unknown in human history Novel forms of state violence and colonization have been unfolding for years in China's vast northwestern region, where more than a million and a half Uyghurs and others have vanished into internment camps and associated factories. Based on hours of interviews with camp survivors and workers, thousands of government documents, and over a decade of research, Darren Byler, one of the leading experts on Uyghur society and Chinese surveillance systems, uncovers how a vast network of technology provided by private companies―facial surveillance, voice recognition, smartphone data―enabled the state and corporations to blacklist millions of Uyghurs because of their religious and cultural practice starting in 2017. Charged with "pre-crimes" that sometimes consist only of installing social media apps, detainees were put in camps to "study"―forced to praise the Chinese government, renounce Islam, disavow families, and labor in factories. Byler travels back to Xinjiang to reveal how the convenience of smartphones have doomed the Uyghurs to catastrophe, and makes the case that the technology is being used all over the world, sold by tech companies from Beijing to Seattle producing new forms of unfreedom for vulnerable people around the world.

Darren Byler (Author), Fajer Al-Kaisi (Narrator)

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The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women's Political Culture

Deanna Gillespie traces the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), a grassroots initiative that taught people to read and write in preparation for literacy tests required for voter registration-a profoundly powerful objective in the Jim Crow South. Born in 1957 as a result of discussions between community activist Esau Jenkins, schoolteacher Septima Clark, and Highlander Folk School director Myles Horton, the CEP became a part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1961. The teachers, mostly Black women, gathered friends and neighbors in living rooms, churches, beauty salons, and community centers. Through the work of the CEP, literate black men and women were able to gather their own information, determine fair compensation for a day's work, and register formal complaints. Drawing on teachers' reports and correspondence, oral history interviews, and papers from a variety of civil rights organizations, Gillespie follows the growth of the CEP from its beginnings in the South Carolina Sea Islands to southeastern Georgia, the Mississippi Delta, and Alabama's Black Belt. This book retells the story of the civil rights movement from the vantage point of activists who have often been overlooked and makeshift classrooms where local people discussed, organized, and demanded change.

Deanna M. Gillespie (Author), Lisa Reneé Pitts (Narrator)

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The Shattering: America in the 1960s

Kevin Boyle (Author), Jonathan Yen (Narrator)

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Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison

A haunting and powerfully moving book that gives voice to the poorest among us and lays bare the cruelty of a penal system that too often defines their lives. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges has taught courses in drama, literature, philosophy, and history since 2013 in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University at East Jersey State Prison and other New Jersey prisons. In his first class at East Jersey State Prison, where students read and discussed plays by Amiri Baraka and August Wilson, among others, his class set out to write a play of their own. In writing the play, Caged, which would run for a month in 2018 to sold-out audiences at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, and later be published, students gave words to the grief and suffering they and their families have endured, as well as to their hopes and dreams. The class's artistic and personal discovery, as well as transformation, is chronicled in heart-breaking detail in Our Class. This book gives a human face and a voice to those our society too often demonizes and abandons. It exposes the terrible crucible and injustice of America's penal system and the struggle by those trapped within its embrace to live lives of dignity, meaning, and purpose.

Chris Hedges (Author), Prentice Onayemi (Narrator)

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Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)

Around the globe, people are faced with a spiraling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to-or actively engineer-each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable. Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

Dean Spade (Author), Stephen R. Thorne (Narrator)

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Not So Black and White: An Invitation to Honest Conversations about Race and Faith

Read by the authors. Reggie Dabbs and John Driver--a Black man and a white man, and longtime friends--engage in a courageous, respectfully honest, challenging exploration of racism in America, including how Black and white Christians can come together to fight the evils of racism within our hearts and our systems, including our churches. White privilege. Black Lives Matter. George Floyd. When it comes to racism in America, many of us feel confused, overwhelmed, angry--and eager to know how to engage in meaningful conversations and actions surrounding such a difficult topic. In Not So Black and White, public school communicator and internationally acclaimed speaker Reggie Dabbs and pastor John Driver team up to offer a hope-filled, convicting, inspiring look at how to be anti-racist in America today. Through Reggie and John's honest conversations, you will: - Hear the stories of fellow believers who have found ways to reach across the racial barrier with humility, empathy, and forgiveness - Understand a simple yet robust history of racism in America and in the church, including its role in systems, policies, and individual actions - Discover fully biblical yet culturally wise responses to the challenges of racism in yourself and your community - Come away with fresh thought processes and practical steps for what you can do to think rightly and engage bravely in conversations and actions to end racism Not So Black and White is a compelling resource for pastors, teachers, and community leaders who want to read about issues of racism from a biblical and a historical perspective. For readers of all denominations and backgrounds, Not So Black and White equips us to engage together in the intentional work of dismantling racism, just as the gospel calls us to do.

John Driver, Reggie Dabbs (Author), John Driver, Reggie Dabbs (Narrator)

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A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community

America is at a pivotal crossroads. The soul of our nation is at stake and in peril. A new public narrative is needed to unite Americans around common values and to counter the increasing discord and acrimony in our politics and culture. The moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr.'s beloved community, which animated and galvanized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, provides a hopeful way forward. In A More Perfect Union, Adam Russell Taylor reimagines a contemporary version of the beloved community that will inspire and unite Americans across generations, geographic and class divides, racial and gender differences, faith traditions, and ideological leanings. In the beloved community, neither privilege nor punishment is tied to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or economic status, and everyone is able to realize their full potential and thrive. Building the beloved community requires living out a series of commitments, such as true equality, radical welcome, transformational interdependence, E Pluribus Unum ('out of many, one'), environmental stewardship, nonviolence, and economic equity. By building the beloved community we unify the country around a shared moral vision that transcends ideology and partisanship, enabling our nation to live up to its best ideals and realize a more perfect union.

Adam Russell Taylor (Author), David Sadzin, Terrence Kidd (Narrator)

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The Global Constitution: One World Government To Save The Earth

The Global Constitution One World Government To Save The Earth by Anonymous - Over the past several years and in the years to come, we will see more and more direct evidence that our political systems are fatally flawed. There are no controls for holding out for common sense solutions before installing only the most expensive and the least effective solutions to our problems. They bring out the worst of our kind and put the rascals into positions of authority over us all and the biggest problem is that there is no way to correct for their maligned behaviors. We are always forced to sit and watch from the sidelines as our country and our planet is degraded and slowly destroyed. The major problem is that the dictators in the world believe that their brains are the only ones capable and wise enough to solve the world's problems, when it is these singularly untrained minds which are the problem. They look at their citizens, the average men and women whom they never understand as if we are ants. We are their cannon fodder. We are like sheep who need to be husbanded, fed and warehoused until such time as it's perceived by them that it's time for our slaughter. Over the centuries their mass slaughter of us has been limited to a few cities and towns. Then, in the last century the mass slaughter expanded into hundreds of cities and dozens of nations being destroyed. The next major war will be brought into every living room on the planet. The next few decades even assuming we are able to skip another major world war, will mean that we will all die from suffocation as all of the oxygen is sucked out of our atmosphere and gradually replaced by a huge black sooty cloud of Carbon Dioxide and Carbon Monoxide, which will spell disaster to all life forms on this Earth. The silence will be deafening and last for millions of years. This is the world's first attempt to unify all the people of the Earth under one set of laws and rules that could prevent total disaster.

Anonymous (Author), Anonymous (Narrator)

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Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

Brought to you by Penguin. Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford prize. Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth, a place where communist ideals had officially replaced religion. Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was almost impossible to visit, almost impossible to leave. It was a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. To Lea, it was home. People were equal, neighbours helped each other, and children were expected to build a better world. There was community and hope. Then, in December 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, everything changed. The statues of Stalin and Hoxha were toppled. Almost overnight, people could vote freely, wear what they liked and worship as they wished. There was no longer anything to fear from prying ears. But factories shut, jobs disappeared and thousands fled to Italy on crowded ships, only to be sent back. Predatory pyramid schemes eventually bankrupted the country, leading to violent conflict. As one generation's aspirations became another's disillusionment, and as her own family's secrets were revealed, Lea found herself questioning what freedom really meant. Free is an engrossing memoir of coming of age amid political upheaval. With acute insight and wit, Lea Ypi traces the limits of progress and the burden of the past, illuminating the spaces between ideals and reality, and the hopes and fears of people pulled up by the sweep of history. 'Funny, moving but also deadly serious, this book will be read for years to come. . . Beautifully brings together the personal and the political to create an unforgettable account of oppression, freedom and what it means to acquire knowledge about the world' David Runciman © Lea Ypi 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Lea Ypi (Author), Lea Ypi, Rachel Bavidge (Narrator)

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Forcing Justice: Violence and Nonviolence in Selected Texts by Thoreau and Gandhi

Can justice be forced on individuals and communities? The essays in this collection by Henry David Thoreau urge us to consider the difficult matter of how to counter the specific injustice manifested in the practice of buying and selling human beings and how to implement laws and practices that help establish justice. Of the many philosophical ideas Thoreau explores, the central concern is how to end slavery and provide justice for all. It is no surprise to find Thoreau defending the idea of civil disobedience, but his defense of John Brown, who used violence, including murder, commands our attention. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. was heavily influenced by the rhetoric, the actions, and the overall philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., who famously combined civil disobedience and nonviolent action under the strong influence of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Although Gandhi staunchly defends and promotes the use of nonviolence, he is quick to condemn inaction as an even greater evil than violence. If forced to choose between doing nothing and using violence, he would choose violence; but his many writings and speeches are designed to show that we almost always have a nonviolent alternative to oppose injustice and foster justice. The lives of more than a billion residents of India have been profoundly shaped by the ideas Gandhi presents and defends in these selections from MY NONVIOLENCE. The liberation of India from British colonialism and the establishing of what Gandhi called 'home rule' is powerful evidence of the role nonviolence can play in bringing about justice and eliminating injustice. Gandhi addresses not only matters of race and skin color but also the caste system and the social stratification that currently pervade the entire globe. These works by Thoreau and Gandhi consider the best way to promote justice and goodness not in utopia but in the actual world where we live. The primary goal of Agora Publications is not to answer such controversial questions by taking sides but to provide access to philosophical works that promote such dialogue.

Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas K. Gandhi (Author), Aidan Anderson, Albert A. Anderson, Dan Woods (Narrator)

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Political Advocacy Audiobooks in Politics