The Social Sciences category has 3,302 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 32,502 ratings. The most-rated is Homo Deus.
The Book of Why
Summary
How the study of causality revolutionized science and the world "Correlation does not imply causation". This mantra has been invoked by scientists for decades and has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed causality - the study of cause and effect - on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet, and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: It lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2018 Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved
Energy and Civilization
Summary
Energy is the only universal currency; it is necessary for getting anything done. The conversion of energy on Earth ranges from terra-forming forces of plate tectonics to cumulative erosive effects of raindrops. Life on Earth depends on the photosynthetic conversion of solar energy into plant biomass. Humans have come to rely on many more energy flows-ranging from fossil fuels to photovoltaic generation of electricity - for their civilized existence. In this monumental history, Vaclav Smil provides a comprehensive account of how energy has shaped society, from pre-agricultural foraging societies through today's fossil fuel-driven civilization. Humans are the only species that can systematically harness energies outside their bodies, using the power of their intellect and an enormous variety of artifacts - from the simplest tools to internal combustion engines and nuclear reactors. The epochal transition to fossil fuels affected everything: agriculture, industry, transportation, weapons, communication, economics, urbanization, quality of life, politics, and the environment. Smil describes humanity's energy eras in panoramic and interdisciplinary fashion, offering listeners a magisterial overview.
©2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2018 Gildan Media
Beach Money
Summary
Unravel the mystery around creating a large residual income in network marketing! Have you ever wondered if the average person can really make it big in network marketing? Have the secrets to success in network marketing always been a mystery to you? Have you given up on your dream lifestyle because it just seems too difficult or too far out of reach? Beach Money shows you how to compress a 30 year career into three to five years, design your life around your free time instead of around your work schedule, and turn your yearly income into your monthly income!
©2018 Jordan Adler (P)2018 Jordan Adler
One Summer
Summary
Audie Award Finalist, History, 2014 One of the most admired nonfiction writers of our time retells the story of one truly fabulous year in the life of his native country - a fascinating and gripping narrative featuring such outsized American heroes as Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, and yes Herbert Hoover, and a gallery of criminals (Al Capone), eccentrics (Shipwreck Kelly), and close-mouthed politicians (Calvin Coolidge). It was the year Americans attempted and accomplished outsized things and came of age in a big, brawling manner. What a country. What a summer. And what a writer to bring it all so vividly alive for us in this certain best-seller.
©2013 Bill Bryson (P)2013 Random House Audio
Ho Tactics
Summary
New for 2018, the expanded Savage Edition including new bonus chapters of the best seller that's taken the world by storm! This is the book that no man wants you to hear. Countless women play by the biased male rules of dating and relationships, ones that keep them in a constant state of stress and worry. Victims of romance instead of masters of love, today's women settle for cheap dates and cheaper talk. Why are you splitting the bill with a man that should be spoiling you? Why are you preparing home cooked meals for a man that can't provide you a home? Why are you having sex with a man that promises the world, but refuses to give you his heart? Why are you playing by outdated rules in hopes that one day your kindness will be rewarded? I have discovered a group of women who refuse to be exploited, are immune to manipulation, and who never settle in the name of love. These ladies know what they want and take what they want by beating men at their own game. Utilizing the secrets exposed in this book, these women gain power, money, and status. Men call them gold diggers, women call them hos, but they call themselves winners. This is the book that society doesn't want you to listen to…. Ho Tactics: How To MindF**k a Man into Spending, Spoiling, and Sponsoring lays out the practical steps to evolve from a woman that goes dutch to a woman that gets pampered. Ho Tactics provides the sex-free blueprint on how to turn any man into your personal ATM. Stop spending nights with men that can't offer you anything but conversation, stop being understanding of men who are underachieving, stop settling and submitting, and learn how to seduce and destroy! You tried to play by their rules, now it's time to play by ho rules.
©2018 Viceroy Publishing (P)2018 Viceroy Publishing
Dopesick
Summary
Journalist Beth Macy's definitive account of America's opioid epidemic "masterfully interlaces stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference" (New York Times) - from the boardroom to the courtroom and into the living rooms of Americans. In this extraordinary work, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of a national drama that has unfolded over two decades. From the labs and marketing departments of big pharma to local doctor's offices; wealthy suburbs to distressed small communities in Central Appalachia; from distant cities to once-idyllic farm towns; the spread of opioid addiction follows a tortuous trajectory that illustrates how this crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched. Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy sets out to answer a grieving mother's question - why her only son died - and comes away with a gripping, unpausible story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy investigates the powerful forces that led America's doctors and patients to embrace a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. In some of the same communities featured in her best-selling book Factory Man, the unemployed use painkillers both to numb the pain of joblessness and pay their bills, while privileged teens trade pills in cul-de-sacs, and even high school standouts fall prey to prostitution, jail, and death. Through unsparing, compelling, and unforgettably humane portraits of families and first responders determined to ameliorate this epidemic, each facet of the crisis comes into focus. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows that one thing uniting Americans across geographic, partisan, and class lines is opioid drug abuse. But even in the midst of twin crises in drug abuse and healthcare, Macy finds reason to hope and ample signs of the spirit and tenacity that are helping the countless ordinary people ensnared by addiction build a better future for themselves, their families, and their communities. "Everyone should read Beth Macy's story of the American opioid epidemic." (Professor Anne C. Case, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and Sir Angus Deaton, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics) PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2018 Beth Macy (P)2018 Hachette Audio
Fresh Off the Boat
Summary
"Long before I met him, I was a fan of his writing, and his merciless wit. He’s bigger than food." (Anthony Bourdain) Eddie Huang is the 30-year-old proprietor of Baohaus - the hot East Village hangout where foodies, stoners, and students come to stuff their faces with delicious Taiwanese street food late into the night - and one of the food world’s brightest and most controversial young stars. But before he created the perfect home for himself in a small patch of downtown New York, Eddie wandered the American wilderness looking for a place to call his own. Eddie grew up in theme-park America, on a could-be-anywhere cul-de-sac in suburban Orlando, raised by a wild family of FOB ("fresh off the boat") hustlers and hysterics from Taiwan. While his father improbably launched a series of successful seafood and steak restaurants, Eddie burned his way through American culture, defying every "model minority" stereotype along the way. He obsessed over football, fought the all-American boys who called him a chink, partied like a gremlin, sold drugs with his crew, and idolized Tupac. His anchor through it all was food - from making Southern ribs with the Haitian cooks in his dad’s restaurant to preparing traditional meals in his mother’s kitchen to haunting the midnight markets of Taipei when he was shipped off to the homeland. After misadventures as an unlikely lawyer, street fashion renegade, and stand-up comic, Eddie finally threw everything he loved - past and present, family, and food - into his own restaurant, bringing together a legacy stretching back to China and the shards of global culture he’d melded into his own identity. Funny, raw, and moving, and told in an irrepressibly alive and original voice, Fresh Off the Boat recasts the immigrant’s story for the 21st century. It’s a story of food, family, and the forging of a new notion of what it means to be American.
©2013 Eddie Huang (P)2013 Random House Audio
Men on Strike
Summary
American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are responding. They're dropping out of college, leaving the workforce, and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. The trend is so pronounced that a number of books have been written about this man-child phenomenon, concluding that men have taken a vacation from responsibility. But why should men participate in a system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them? As Men on Strike demonstrates, men aren't dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development; they are acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands, and providers. In addition, men are going on strike, either consciously or unconsciously, because they do not want to be injured by the myriad of laws, attitudes, and hostility against them for the crime of happening to be male in the 21st century. Men are starting to fight back. Men on Strike explains their battle cry.
©2013 Helen Smith, PhD (P)2017 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Intuition and the Mystical Life
Summary
What if you could live your life in partnership with divinity, using your intuition as your guide? According to Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., and Caroline Myss - such a life is possible. In fact, it is the life that mystics have chosen throughout history, and only one thing is required: the willingness to completely surrender to divine instruction. Now Caroline Myss and Dr. Estes - two of the country's leading intuitives and bestselling authors - are together for the first time on audio with Intuition and the Mystical Life.
©2003 Sounds True (P)2003 Sounds True
Deviant
Summary
From "America's principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers" (Boston Book Review) comes the definitive account of Ed Gein, a mild-mannered Wisconsin farmhand who stunned an unsuspecting nation - and redefined the meaning of the word psycho. The year was 1957. The place was an ordinary farmhouse in America's heartland, filled with extraordinary evidence of unthinkable depravity. The man behind the massacre was a slight, unassuming Midwesterner with a strange smile - and an even stranger attachment to his domineering mother. After her death and a failed attempt to dig up his mother's body from the local cemetery, Gein turned to other grave robberies and, ultimately, multiple murders. Driven to commit gruesome and bizarre acts beyond all imagination, Ed Gein remains one of the most deranged minds in the annals of American homicide. This is his story, recounted in fascinating and chilling detail by Harold Schechter, one of the most acclaimed true-crime storytellers of our time.
©1989 Harold Schechter (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
I've Been Meaning to Tell You
Summary
In the tradition of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, acclaimed novelist David Chariandy's latest is an intimate and profoundly beautiful meditation on the politics of race today.
When a moment of quietly ignored bigotry prompted his three-year-old daughter to ask "what happened?" David Chariandy began wondering how to discuss with his children the politics of race. A decade later, in a newly heated era of both struggle and divisions, he writes a letter to his now 13-year-old daughter. David is the son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, and he draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including the legacies of slavery, indenture, and immigration, as well as the experiences of growing up a visible minority within the land of one's birth. In sharing with his daughter his own story, he hopes to help cultivate within her a sense of identity and responsibility that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for the future.
©2018 David Chariandy (P)2018 McClelland & Stewart
Islands of Decolonial Love
Summary
In her debut collection of short stories, Islands of Decolonial Love, renowned writer and activist Leanne Simpson vividly explores the lives of contemporary Indigenous Peoples and communities, especially those of her own Nishnaabeg nation. Found on reserves, in cities and small towns, in bars and curling rinks, canoes and community centres, doctors offices and pickup trucks, Simpson's characters confront the often heartbreaking challenge of pairing the desire to live loving and observant lives with a constant struggle to simply survive the historical and ongoing injustices of racism and colonialism. Told with voices that are rarely recorded but need to be heard, and incorporating the language and history of her people, Leanne Simpson's Islands of Decolonial Love is a profound, important, and beautiful book of fiction. Bespeak Audio Editions brings Canadian voices to the world with audiobook editions of some of the country’s greatest works of literature, performed by Canadian actors.
©2013 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (P)2019 Bespeak Audio Editions
Secrets of Six-Figure Women
Summary
Quietly and steadily, the number of women making six figures or more is increasing and continues to rise at a rate faster than for men. From entrepreneurs to corporate executives, from white-collar professionals to freelancers and part-timers, women are forging careers with considerable financial success. In Secrets of Six-Figure Women, Barbara Stanny, journalist, motivational speaker, and financial educator, identifies the seven key strategies of female high earners: Profit Motive, Audacity, Resilience, Encouragement, Self-Awareness, Non-Attachment, and Financial Know-How. Based on extensive research and hundreds of interviews, including more than 150 women whose annual earnings range from $100,000 to $7 million, Stanny turns each of the six-figure traits into a specific strategy for upping earnings. By rigorously fine-tuning them, listeners can, step-by-step, climb the income ladder.
©2004 Barbara Stanny (P)2017 Tantor
The Lost Art of Listening, Second Edition
Summary
One person talks; the other listens. It's so basic that we take it for granted. Unfortunately, most of us think of ourselves as better listeners than we actually are. Why do we so often fail to connect when speaking with family members, romantic partners, colleagues, or friends? How do emotional reactions get in the way of real communication? This thoughtful, witty, and empathic book has already helped over 100,000 people break through conflicts and transform their personal and professional relationships. Experienced therapist Michael P. Nichols, PhD, provides vivid examples, easy-to-learn techniques, and practical exercises for becoming a better listener and making yourself heard and understood, even in difficult situations.
©2009 Michael P. Nichols (P)2016 Tantor
Because Internet
Summary
An Instant New York Times Best Seller! Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Amazon, and The Washington Post A Wired Must-Read Book of Summer “Gretchen McCulloch is the internet’s favorite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her work is like suddenly being able to see the matrix.” (Jonny Sun, author of everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too) Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time. Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer "LOL" or "lol," why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.
©2019 Gretchen McCulloch (P)2019 Penguin Audio
How to Survive a Pandemic
Summary
This program is read by the author. A vital, timely text on the viruses that cause pandemics and how to face them, by the New York Times best-selling author of How Not to Die. From tuberculosis to bird flu and HIV to coronavirus, these infectious diseases share a common origin story: Human interaction with animals. Otherwise known as zoonotic diseases for their passage from animals to humans, these pathogens - both pre-existing ones and those newly identified - emerge and re-emerge throughout history, sparking epidemics and pandemics that have resulted in millions of deaths around the world. How did these diseases come about? And what - if anything - can we do to stop them and their fatal march into our countries, our homes, and our bodies? In How to Survive a Pandemic, Dr. Michael Greger, physician and internationally-recognized expert on public health issues, delves into the origins of some of the deadliest pathogens the world has ever seen. Tracing their evolution from the past until today, Dr. Greger spotlights emerging flu and coronaviruses as he examines where these pathogens originated, as well as the underlying conditions and significant human role that have exacerbated their lethal influence to large, and even global, levels. As the world grapples with the devastating impact of the novel coronavirus 2019, or COVID-19, Dr. Greger reveals not only what we can do to protect ourselves and our loved ones during a pandemic, but also what human society must rectify to reduce the likelihood of even worse catastrophes in the future. A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2020 Michael Greger (P)2020 Macmillan Audio
What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat
Summary
From the creator of Your Fat Friend and co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast, an explosive indictment of the systemic and cultural bias facing plus-size people. Anti-fatness is everywhere. In What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, Aubrey Gordon unearths the cultural attitudes and social systems that have led to people being denied basic needs because they are fat and calls for social justice movements to be inclusive of plus-sized people’s experiences. Unlike the recent wave of memoirs and quasi self-help books that encourage listeners to love and accept themselves, Gordon pushes the discussion further towards authentic fat activism, which includes ending legal weight discrimination, giving equal access to health care for large people, increased access to public spaces, and ending anti-fat violence. As she argues, “I did not come to body positivity for self-esteem. I came to it for social justice.” By sharing her experiences as well as those of others - from smaller fat to very fat people - she concludes that to be fat in our society is to be seen as an undeniable failure, unlovable, unforgivable, and morally condemnable. Fatness is an open invitation for others to express disgust, fear, and insidious concern. To be fat is to be denied humanity and empathy. Studies show that fat survivors of sexual assault are less likely to be believed and less likely than their thin counterparts to report various crimes; 27 percent of very fat women and 13 percent of very fat men attempt suicide; over 50 percent of doctors describe their fat patients as “awkward, unattractive, ugly and noncompliant”; and in 48 states, it’s legal - even routine - to deny employment because of an applicant’s size. Advancing fat justice and changing prejudicial structures and attitudes will require work from all people. What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is a crucial tool to create a tectonic shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike.
©2020 Aubrey Gordon (P)2020 Beacon Press
Black Elk
Summary
Here is the epic life story of the Native American holy man who has inspired millions around the world. Black Elk, the Native American holy man, is known to millions around the world from his 1932 testimonial, Black Elk Speaks. Adapted by the poet John Neihardt from a series of interviews, it is one of the most widely read and admired works of American Indian literature. Cryptic and deeply personal, it has been read as a spiritual guide, a philosophical manifesto, and a text to be deconstructed - while the historical Black Elk has faded from view. In this sweeping book, Joe Jackson provides the definitive biographical account of a figure whose dramatic life converged with some of the most momentous events in the history of the American West. Born in an era of rising violence, Black Elk killed his first man at Little Big Horn, witnessed the death of his second cousin Crazy Horse, and traveled to Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Upon his return, he was swept up in the traditionalist Ghost Dance movement and shaken by the massacre at Wounded Knee. But Black Elk was not a warrior, and instead chose the path of a healer and holy man, motivated by a powerful prophetic vision that haunted and inspired him, even after he converted to Catholicism in his later years. In Black Elk, Jackson has crafted a true American epic, restoring to Black Elk the richness of his times and gorgeously portraying a life of heroism and tragedy, adaptation and endurance, in an era of permanent crisis on the Great Plains.
©2016 Joe Jackson (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
My Life on the Road
Summary
Gloria Steinem - writer, activist, organizer, and one of the most inspiring leaders in the world - now tells a story she has never told before, a candid account of how her early years led her to live an on-the-road kind of life, traveling, listening to people, learning, and creating change. She reveals the story of her own growth in tandem with the growth of an ongoing movement for equality. This is the story at the heart of My Life on the Road. Includes an introduction read by Gloria Steinem.
©2015 Gloria Steinem (P)2015 Random House Audio
When to Rob a Bank
Summary
Why do educated women get fewer responses on online dating websites? Is buying local food economically efficient? Does bribing kids improve their performance on school tests? Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the quirky geniuses behind Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics, and Think Like a Freak, are back at it. For the last 10 years, they've used the tools of economics to answer some of our most unanswerable questions on the Freakonomics.com blog. Here, for the first time, the very best of their more than 8,000 posts are together in a single place. We learn why it's so hard to predict the Kentucky Derby, why babies born in summer tend to score lower on standardized tests, and why rich people tend to be happier than poor people but rich countries no happier than poor ones. When to Rob a Bank showcases the brilliance that has made Levitt and Dubner an international sensation and the eloquence and wit that has always made them such a joy to read and listen to.
©2015 Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (P)2015 HarperCollins Canada