The Politics & Government category has 4,793 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 40,708 ratings. The most-rated is A Promised Land.
Pills, Powder, and Smoke
Summary
Like the never-ending war on terror, the drugs war is a multi-billion-dollar industry that won’t go down without a fight. Pills, Powder, and Smoke explains why.
The war on drugs has been official American policy since the 1970s, with the UK, Europe and much of the world following suit. It is at best a failed policy, according to best-selling author Antony Loewenstein. Its direct results have included mass incarceration in the US, extreme violence in different parts of the world, the backing of dictatorships and surging drug addiction globally. And now the Trump administration is unleashing diplomatic and military forces against any softening of the conflict.
Pills, Powder, and Smoke investigates the individuals, officials, activists, victims, DEA agents and traffickers caught up in this deadly war. Travelling through the UK, the US, Australia, Honduras, the Philippines and Guinea-Bissau, Loewenstein uncovers the secrets of the drug war, why it's so hard to end, and who is really profiting from it.
In reporting on the front lines across the globe - from the killing fields of Central America to major cocaine transit routes in West Africa - Loewenstein reveals how the war on drugs has become the most deadly war in modern times. Designed and inspired by Washington, its agenda has nothing to do with ending drug use or addiction but is all about controlling markets, territories and people. Instead, Loewenstein argues, the legalisation and regulation of all drugs would be a much more realistic and humane approach. The evidence presented in this book will persuade many listeners that he's right.
©2019 Antony Loewenstein (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing
Guests of the Ayatollah
Summary
On November 4, 1979, a group of radical Islamist students, inspired by revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They took 52 Americans hostage and kept nearly all of them captive 444 days. The Iran hostage crisis was a watershed moment in American history. It was America's first showdown with Islamic fundamentalism, a confrontation at the forefront of American policy to this day. It was also a powerful dramatic story that captivated the American people, launched yellow-ribbon campaigns, made celebrities of the hostage's families, and crippled the reelection campaign of President Jimmy Carter. Mark Bowden tells this sweeping story through the eyes of the hostages, their radical, naive captors, the soldiers sent on the impossible mission to free them, and the diplomats working to end the crisis. Taking listeners from the Oval Office to the hostages' cells, Guests of the Ayatollah is a remarkably detailed, brilliantly re-created, and suspenseful account of a crisis that gripped and ultimately changed the world.
©2006 Mark Bowden (P)2006 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. Audioworks is an imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division
The Hardhat Riot
Summary
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "Perhaps the best book ever on how Democrats lost the white working class." (James Carville) In May 1970, four days after Kent State, construction workers chased students through downtown Manhattan, beating scores of protesters bloody. As hardhats clashed with hippies, it soon became clear that something larger was underway - Democrats were at war with themselves. In The Hardhat Riot, David Paul Kuhn tells the fateful story of when the white working class first turned against liberalism, when Richard Nixon seized the breach, and America was forever changed. It was unthinkable one generation before: FDR's "forgotten man" siding with the party of Big Business and, ultimately, paving the way for presidencies from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. This is the story of the schism that tore liberalism apart. In the shadow of the half-built Twin Towers, on the same day the Knicks rallied against the odds and won their first championship, we experience the tumult of Nixon's America and John Lindsay's New York City, as festering division explodes into violence and Nixon's advisors realize that the Democratic coalition has collapsed, that this is their chance, because "these, quite candidly, are our people now." In this riveting story - rooted in meticulous research, including thousands of pages of never-before-seen records - we go back to a harrowing day that explains the politics of today. We experience an emerging class conflict between two newly polarized Americas, and how it all boiled over on one brutal day, when the Democratic Party's future was bludgeoned by its past.
©2020 David Paul Kuhn (P)2020 Tantor
Poisoned
Summary
After years of prosecuting hard-core criminals, rising legal star Alan Bell took a private sector job in South Florida's newest skyscraper. Suddenly, he suffered such bizarre medical symptoms, doctors suspected he'd been poisoned by the Mafia. Bell's rapidly declining health forced him to flee his glamorous Miami life to a sterile "bubble" in the remote Arizona desert. As his career and marriage dissolved, Bell pursued medical treatments in a race against time, hoping to stay alive and raise his young daughter, his one desperate reason to keep going. He eventually discovered he wasn't poisoned by a criminal, but by his office building. His search for a cure led him to discover the horrifying truth: his tragedy was just the tip of the iceberg. Millions of people fall ill and die each year because of toxic chemical exposures - without knowing they're at risk. Stunned by what he discovered, Bell chose to fight back, turning his plight into an opportunity. Despite his precarious health, he began collaborating with scientists dedicated to raising awareness about this issue. Soon, he also found himself drawn back into the legal field, teaming up with top lawyers fighting for those who had already fallen ill. Both a riveting medical mystery and a cautionary tale, this book puts a human face on the hidden truths behind toxic dangers assaulting us in our everyday environments - and offers practical ways to protect ourselves and our children.
©2017 Alan Bell (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
The Highest Glass Ceiling
Summary
Since Victoria Woodhull launched her symbolic bid for the presidency in 1872, dozens of women have sought the presidency over the past 150 years. Their quest began long before women won the vote, and it unfolded over decades when a woman's pursuit of any higher political office was met with prejudice, mockery, and hostility. Even after women started voting in 1920, they remained shut out of rooms where presidential candidacies were often born. Whether a woman will break through the glass ceiling during the current election cycle is uncertain, Fitzpatrick acknowledges. But it will happen sooner or later.
©2016 Ellen Fitzpatrick (P)2016 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Conspiracy Theories
Summary
Are they messing with our minds? Is Big Brother watching everything we do? Why is the UK government forcing through identity cards? Are we all just a number in the system? In a world where individuals become nothing but a number in a massive system, is it time to shout STOP? Are we being controlled from the very moment we are born until the time of our death? It's time to put a stop to the ever encroaching and invasive influences upon our minds and our lives.
©2009 World Wide Multi Media (P)2009 World Wide Multi Media
Right Is Wrong
Summary
With her trademark passion, intelligence, and devastating wit, Huffington Post editor in chief Arianna Huffington tackles the issues that are crucial to this year's presidential election and, even more so, to the fate of the country. Huffington makes the case that America has been hijacked from within by a radical element - the "lunatic fringe" of the Right that has taken over the Republican Party. Despite holding views at odds with the majority of Americans, these zealots have given us an endless war in Iraq, a sputtering economy, a health-care system on life support, a war on science and reason, and an immoral embrace of torture. But they haven't done it on their own; they have been enabled by a compliant media - which acts as if there is no such thing as truth and is more interested in cozying up to those in power than in holding them accountable - and by feckless Democrats who have allowed themselves to be intimidated into backing down again and again. Both a withering indictment and a hopeful call to arms, Right Is Wrong is an explosive, boldly incisive work that will help set the national agenda.
©2008 Christabella, Inc. (P)2008 Random House, Inc.
![Cover art for El Color de la Justicia [The New Jim Crow]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51xBBxG2axL._SL500_.jpg)
El Color de la Justicia [The New Jim Crow]
Summary
En este revolucionario trabajo que ha permanecido por mas de dos anos en la lista de los libros mas vendidos del New York Times, Michelle Alexander argumenta que "no hemos erradicado las castas raciales en Estados Unidos; las hemos meramente redisenado". Al apuntar a hombres negros por medio de la Guerra contra las Drogas y diezmando las comunidades de gente de color, el sistema de justicia criminal de Estados Unidos funciona como un sistema contemporaneo de control racial - al relegar a millones de personas a un estatus de segunda clase - incluso mientras este se adhiere al principio de ceguera para los colores. Los hispanoamericanos estan ampliamente representados en este sistema de encarcelamiento masivo que Alexander describe: 15 por ciento de todos los latinos en Estados Unidos dicen que ellos o alguien de su familia inmediata ha sido arrestado dentro de los ultimos cinco anos; y que cerca del 25 por ciento de los latinos de entre 18 y 29 anos comparten esta experiencia. Los latinos representan cerca de la mitad de todos los convictos en las prisiones federales, y en California (uno de los pocos estados que cuenta con informacion sobre esto), los latinos componen un 40 por ciento de todos los arrestos. Catedraticos tales como Tom Romero han sugerido que The New Jim Crow provee de los fundamentos esenciales para comprender el "nuevo sistema Jim Crow" de inmigracion y detencion en los Estados Unidos al dia de hoy. Millones de familias de habla hispana afectadas por este sistema apreciaran contar con una edicion en espanol de este libro que ha sido considerado como "invaluable" por el Daily Kos y "explosivo" por Kirkus Reviews. Please note: This audiobook is in Spanish.
©2010, 2012, 2017 Michelle Alexander (P)2017 Recorded Books
Floating City
Summary
"[A] fascinating X-ray of the city…Venkatesh's engrossing narrative dissects the intricacies of illegal commerce." (Publishers Weekly) New York is a city of highs and lows, where wealthy elites share the streets with desperate immigrants and destitute locals. Bridging this economic divide is New York's underground economy, the invisible network of illicit transactions between rich and poor that secretly weaves together the whole city. Sudhir Venkatesh, acclaimed sociologist at Columbia University and author of Gang Leader for a Day, returns to the streets to connect the dots of New York's divergent economic worlds - and crack the code of the city's underground economy. Based on Venkatesh's interviews with prostitutes and socialites, immigrants and academics, high end drug bosses and street-level dealers, Floating City exposes the underground as the city's true engine of social transformation and economic prosperity - revealing a wholly unprecedented vision of New York. A memoir of sociological investigation, Floating City draws from Venkatesh's decade of research within the affluent communities of Upper East Side socialites and Midtown businessmen; the drug gangs of Harlem and the sex workers of Brooklyn; the artists of Tribeca and the escort services of Hell's Kitchen. Venkatesh arrived in the city after his groundbreaking research in Chicago, where crime remained stubbornly local: gangs stuck to their housing projects and criminals stayed on their corners. But in Floating City, Venkatesh discovers that New York's underground economy unites instead of divides inhabitants: a vast network of "off the books" transactions linking the high and low worlds of the city.
©2013 Sudhir Venkatesh (P)2013 Penguin Audio
Disrupting My Comfort Zone
Summary
This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.
©2006 This I Believe Inc. (P)2006 This I Believe Inc., Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC
Late Victorian Holocausts
Summary
Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China, and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.
©2017 Mike Davis (P)2017 Tantor
American Grace
Summary
American Grace takes its findings from two of the largest, most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America, plus in-depth studies of diverse congregations---among them a megachurch, a Mormon congregation, a Catholic parish, a reform Jewish synagogue, and an African American congregation. From abortion to gay marriage to feminism, this book shows how religion has influenced politics in America---and vice versa. The discoveries are often unexpected: The most politicized churches tend to be liberal, not conservative, congregations. Faith matters less to Americans than their communities of faith. Most Americans marry outside their religion. And nearly half of all Americans change their religion at some point during their lifetime. Robert D. Putnam won huge acclaim for Bowling Alone and Better Together. Together with coauthor David E. Campbell, Putnam brings his distinctive brand of in-depth research and analysis to religion in America.
©2010 Robert Hellenga (P)2010 Tantor
The Resilience Dividend
Summary
Building resilience - the ability to bounce back more quickly and effectively - is an urgent social and economic issue. Our interconnected world is susceptible to sudden and dramatic shocks and stresses: a cyber-attack, a new strain of virus, a structural failure, a violent storm, a civil disturbance, an economic blow. Through an astonishing range of stories, Judith Rodin shows how people, organizations, businesses, communities, and cities have developed resilience in the face of otherwise catastrophic challenges: Medellin, Colombia, was once the drug and murder capital of South America. Now it's host to international conferences and an emerging vacation destination. Tulsa, Oklahoma, cracked the code of rapid urban development in a floodplain. Airbnb, Toyota, Ikea, Coca-Cola, and other companies have realized the value of reducing vulnerabilities and potential threats to customers, employees, and their bottom line. In the Mau Forest of Kenya, bottom-up solutions are critical for dealing with climate change, environmental degradation, and displacement of locals. Following Superstorm Sandy, the Rockaway Surf Club in New York played a vital role in distributing emergency supplies. As we grow more adept at managing disruption and more skilled at resilience-building, Rodin reveals how we are able to create and take advantage of new economic and social opportunities that offer us the capacity to recover after catastrophes and grow strong in times of relative calm.
©2014 Judith Rodin (P)2014 Gildan Media LLC
Return to the Reich
Summary
The remarkable story of Fred Mayer, a German-born Jew who escaped Nazi Germany only to return as an American commando on a secret mission behind enemy lines. Growing up in Germany, Freddy Mayer witnessed the Nazis' rise to power. When he was 16, his family made the decision to flee to the United States - they were among the last German Jews to escape, in 1938. In America, Freddy tried enlisting the day after Pearl Harbor, only to be rejected as an “enemy alien” because he was German. He was soon recruited to the OSS, the country’s first spy outfit before the CIA. Freddy, joined by Dutch-Jewish refugee Hans Wynberg and Nazi defector Franz Weber, parachuted into Austria as the leader of Operation Greenup, meant to deter Hitler’s last stand. He posed as a Nazi officer and a French POW for months, dispatching reports to the OSS via Hans, holed up with a radio in a nearby attic. The reports contained a goldmine of information, provided key intelligence about the Battle of the Bulge, and allowed the Allies to bomb 20 Nazi trains. On the verge of the Allied victory, Freddy was captured by the Gestapo and tortured and waterboarded for days. Remarkably, he persuaded the Nazi commander for the region to surrender, completing one of the most successful OSS missions of the war. Based on years of research and interviews with Mayer himself, whom the author was able to meet only months before his death at the age of 94, Return to the Reich is an eye-opening, unforgettable narrative of World War II heroism.
©2019 Eric Lichtblau (P)2019 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Fire in the Lake
Summary
Frances FitzGerald's landmark history of Vietnam and the Vietnam War, "A compassionate and penetrating account of the collision of two societies that remain untranslatable to one another." (New York Times Book Review) This magisterial work, based on Frances FitzGerald's many years of research and travels, takes us inside the history of Vietnam - the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages, the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks, the disruption created by French colonialism, and America's ill-fated intervention - and reveals the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes. Originally published in 1972, Fire in the Lake was the first history of Vietnam written by an American, and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Award. With a clarity and insight unrivaled by any author before it or since, Frances FitzGerald illustrates how America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam.
©1972, 2009 Frances FitzGerald (P)2018 Hachette Audio
Henry Clay
Summary
He was the Great Compromiser, a canny and colorful legislator whose life mirrors the story of America from its founding until the eve of the Civil War. Speaker of the House, senator, secretary of state, five-time presidential candidate, and idol to the young Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay is captured in full at last in this rich and sweeping biography. David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler present Clay in his early years as a precocious, witty, and optimistic Virginia farm boy who at the age of 20 transformed himself into an attorney. The authors reveal Clay's tumultuous career in Washington, including his participation in the deadlocked election of 1824 that haunted him for the rest of his career, and shine new light on Clay's marriage to plain, wealthy Lucretia Hart, a union that lasted 53 years and produced 11 children. Featuring an inimitable supporting cast including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay is beautifully written and replete with fresh anecdotes and insights. Horse trader and risk taker, arm twister and joke teller, Henry Clay was the consummate politician who gave ground, made deals, and changed the lives of millions.
©2010 David Heidler and Jeanne Heidler (P)2018 Tantor
TR's Last War
Summary
A riveting new account of Theodore Roosevelt's impassioned crusade for military preparedness as America fitfully stumbles into World War I, spectacularly punctuated by his unique tongue-lashings of the vacillating Woodrow Wilson, his rousing advocacy of a masculine, pro-Allied "Americanism", a death-defying compulsion for personal front-line combat, a gingerly rapprochement with GOP power brokers - and, yes, perhaps, even another presidential campaign. Roosevelt is a towering Greek god of war. But Greek gods begat Greek tragedies. His own entreaties to don the uniform are rebuffed, and he remains stateside. But his four sons fight "over there" with heartbreaking consequences: two are wounded; his youngest and most loved child dies in aerial combat. Yet, though grieving and weary, TR may yet surmount everything with one monumentally odds-defying last triumph. Poised at the very brink of a final return to the White House, death stills his indomitable spirit. In his lively, witty, blow-by-blow style, David Pietrusza captures, through the lens of the Bull Moose, the 1916 presidential campaign, America's entry into the Great War in 1917, Woodrow Wilson's presidency, and the last years of one of American history's greatest men.
©2018 David Pietrusza (P)2018 Tantor
State and Revolution
Summary
The State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin was published in 1917. Lenin's definition of the State is “a special organisation of force: it is an organisation of violence for the suppression of a class." Quoting Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Lenin investigates theoretical questions about the role and functions of the State in society after the proletarian revolution. He addresses the arguments of anarchists, reformists and social democrats, claiming that a social democratic system cannot establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. For Lenin, the revolution would first establish “the lower stage of communist society”, and later the “higher stage of communist society” that would yield a stable system where personal freedom might be expressed.
Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks
You Are Not American
Summary
Citizenship is invaluable, yet our status as citizens is always at risk - even for those born on US soil. Over the last two centuries, the US government has revoked citizenship to cast out its unwanted, suppress dissent, and deny civil rights to all considered "un-American" - whether due to their race, ethnicity, marriage partner, or beliefs. Drawing on the narratives of those who have struggled to be treated as full members of "We the People", law Professor Amanda Frost exposes a hidden history of discrimination and xenophobia that continues to this day. The Supreme Court's rejection of Black citizenship in Dred Scott was among the first and most notorious examples of citizenship stripping, but the phenomenon did not end there. Women who married noncitizens, persecuted racial groups, labor leaders, and political activists were all denied their citizenship, and sometimes deported, by a government that wanted to redefine the meaning of "American". Today, US citizens living near the southern border are regularly denied passports, thousands are detained and deported by mistake, and the Trump administration is investigating the citizenship of 700,000 naturalized citizens. Even elected leaders such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are not immune from false claims that they are not citizens eligible to hold office. You Are Not American grapples with what it means to be American and the issues surrounding membership, identity, belonging, and exclusion that still occupy and divide the nation in the 21st century.
©2021 Amanda Frost (P)2021 Beacon Press
Takeover
Summary
Six of the nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court are current or former members of The Federalist Society - a private, conservative legal organization which has grown to dominate modern American jurisprudence. Takeover tells the story of how The Federalist Society started as a student club and grew to become the most influential legal organization in US history. Over the last three decades, they managed to shape judicial policy and secure numerous seats for its members on courts of appeals and the Supreme Court. Now at the height of its prominence, the organization faces new challenges and internal divisions threaten to splinter the group as its members debate the core founding principles of the Federalist Society. Author and narrator Noah Feldman, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, host of the Deep Background podcast, and author of several books including The Arab Winter and The Three Lives of James Madison, provides special insight and access into this organization. He takes listeners into the offices and chambers of the people who know the Federalist Society best and illuminates how the group came to power, the challenges it faces, and its future which should matter to everyone.
©2021 Pushkin Industries (P)2021 Pushkin Industries