The Sociology category has 542 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 7,644 ratings. The most-rated is Blink.
The Culture of Narcissism
Summary
When The Culture of Narcissism was first published, it was clear that Christopher Lasch had identified something important: what was happening to American society in the wake of the decline of the family over the last century. The book quickly became a best seller. This edition includes a new afterword, "The Culture of Narcissism Revisited."
©1979 Christopher Lasch (P)2017 Tantor
Society of the Spectacle
Summary
This is the "Das Kapital" of the 20th century - an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the 21st century. This is the original translation by Fredy Perlman, kept in print continuously for the last 50 years, keeping the flame of personal and collective autonomy alive.
©1983 Guy DeBord (P)2015 New Saucerian Press
The Art of Choosing
Summary
Every day we make choices. Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go?Whether mundane or life-altering, these choices define us and shape our lives. Sheena Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests? How much control do we really have over what we choose? Sheena Iyengar's award-winning research reveals that the answers are surprising and profound. In our world of shifting political and cultural forces, technological revolution, and interconnected commerce, our decisions have far-reaching consequences. Use The Art of Choosing as your companion and guide for the many challenges ahead.
©2010 Sheena Iyengar (P)2010 Hachette
Virus of the Mind
Summary
Virus of the Mind is the first popular work devoted to the science of memetics, a controversial new field that transcends psychology, biology, anthropology, and cognitive science. Memetics is the science of memes, the invisible but very real DNA of human society. Here, the author carefully builds on the work of scientists Richard Dawkins, Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, and others who have become fascinated with memes and their potential impact on our lives. Mind viruses have already infected governments, educational systems, and inner cities, leading to some of the most pervasive and troublesome problems of society today: youth gangs, the welfare cycle, the deterioration of the public schools, and ever growing government bureaucracy. Richard Brodie weaves together science, ethics, and current events as he raises these and other very disturbing issues relating to memes.
©2009 Hay House, Inc. (P)2009 Hay House, Inc.
The Immoral Majority
Summary
Evangelicals are losing the culture war. What if it’s their fault? In 2016, writer and filmmaker Ben Howe found himself disillusioned with the religious movement he’d always called home. In the pursuit of electoral victory, many American evangelicals embraced moral relativism and toxic partisanship. Whatever happened to the Moral Majority, who headed to Washington in the ’80s to plant the flag of Christian values? Where were the Christian leaders that emerged from that movement and led the charge against Bill Clinton for his deception and unfaithfulness? Was all that a sham? Or have they just lost sight of why they wanted to win in the first place? From the 1980s scandals till today, evangelicals have often been caricatured as a congregation of judgmental and prudish rubes taken in by thundering pastors consumed with greed and lust for power. Did the critics have a point? In The Immoral Majority, Howe - still a believer and still deeply conservative - analyzes and debunks the intellectual dishonesty and manipulative rhetoric which evangelical leaders use to convince Christians to toe the Republican Party line. He walks us through the history of the Christian Right, as well as the events of the last three decades which led to the current state of the conservative movement at large. As long as evangelicals prioritize power over persuasion, Howe argues, their pews will be empty and their national influence will dwindle. If evangelicals hope to avoid cultural irrelevance going forward, it will mean valuing the eternal over the ephemeral, humility over ego, and resisting the seduction of political power, no matter the cost. The Immoral Majority demonstrates how the Religious Right is choosing the profits of this world at the cost of its soul - and why it’s not too late to change course.
©2019 Ben Howe (P)2019 HarperAudio
American Fire
Summary
Shocked by a five-month arson spree that left rural Virginia reeling, Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse drove down to Accomack County to cover the trial of Charlie Smith, who pled guilty to 67 counts of arson. But Charlie wasn't lighting fires alone: he had an accomplice - his girlfriend, Tonya Bundick. Through her depiction of the dangerous shift that happened in their passionate relationship, Hesse brilliantly brings to life the once-thriving coastal community and its distressed inhabitants, who had already been decimated by a punishing economy before they were terrified by a string of fires they could not explain. Incorporating this drama into the long-overlooked history of arson in the United States, American Fire re-creates the anguished nights that this quiet county spent lit up in flames, mesmerizingly evoking a microcosm of rural America - a land half gutted before the fires even began.
©2017 Monica Hesse (P)2017 Dreamscape Media, LLC
The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-Partner Relationships and Families
Summary
Marriage and monogamy are not what they used to be, and today many couples are opting to start families before getting married, or deciding not to get married at all. At the same time, gay couples in states that recognize same-sex marriage are getting married in droves. Some people prefer non-monogamy and have relationships that include swinging and polyamory. The landscape of American marriage and relationships is changing, and a variety of family systems are developing and becoming more common. The Polyamorists Next Door introduces polyamorous families, in which people are free to pursue emotional, romantic, and sexual relationships with multiple people at the same time. They do it openly and with support from their partners, sometimes forming multi-partner relationships or other arrangements that allow for emotional and sexual freedom within the family system. In colorful and moving details, this audiobook explores how polyamorous relationships come to be, how they grow and change, how they manage the ins and outs of daily family life, and how they cope with the challenges they face both within their families and from society. Using polyamorists own words, Dr. Elisabeth Sheff examines polyamorous households and reveals their advantages, disadvantages, and the daily lives of those living in them. While polyamorous families are increasingly common, fairly little is known about them outside of their own social circles or of the occasional media sensationalism. This book provides information that will be useful for professionals with polyamorous clients, educators who wish to understand or teach polyamory, and especially people who wish to better understand polyamory themselves or explain it to their potential partners, adult children, or in-laws.
©2014 Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (P)2015 Redwood Audiobooks
The Armchair Economist
Summary
The extensively revised and updated edition of Steven Landsburg's hugely popular book, The Armchair Economist - "a delightful compendium of quotidian examples illustrating important economic and financial theories" (The Journal of Finance). In this revised and updated edition of Steven Landsburg's hugely popular book, he applies economic theory to today's most pressing concerns, answering a diverse range of daring questions, such as: Why are seat belts deadly? Why do celebrity endorsements sell products? Why are failed executives paid so much? Who should bear the cost of oil spills? Do government deficits matter? How is workplace safety bad for workers? What's wrong with the local foods movement? Which rich people can't be taxed? Why is rising unemployment sometimes good? Why do women pay more at the dry cleaner? Why is life full of disappointments? Whether these are nagging questions you've always had, or ones you never even thought to ask, this new edition of The Armchair Economist turns the eternal ideas of economic theory into concrete answers that you can use to navigate the challenges of contemporary life.
©2012 Steven E. Landsburg (P)2018 Tantor
Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church
Summary
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service The story behind this groundbreaking audiobook - one of the most significant works of investigative journalism since Woodward and Bernstein's reporting on Watergate - has been brought brilliantly to life on the screen in the major new movie Spotlight. Here are the devastating revelations that triggered a crisis within the Catholic Church. Here is the truth about the scores of abusive priests who preyed upon innocent children and the cabal of senior church officials who covered up their crimes. Here is the trail of "hush money" that the Catholic Church secretly paid to buy victims' silence - deeds that left millions of the faithful in the US and around the world shocked, angry, and confused. Here as well is a vivid account of the ongoing struggle as Catholics confront their church and call for sweeping change.
©2002 The Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe (P)2015 Hachette Audio
Seven Days in the Art World
Summary
The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture.
©2008 Sarah Thornton (P)2014 Tantor
Hacking Assessment
Summary
How to go gradeless - assessment that makes learning visible "What's my grade? What's it worth? Is there extra credit? Is this for a mark?" It's time to shift the conversation and make learning visible. Now, you can easily stop reducing students to a number, letter, or any label that misrepresents learning and assessment in education. Now, you can help children see the value in every single assignment. Today, you can make assessment a rich, ongoing conversation that inspires learning for the sake of learning, rather than as a punishment or a reward. All you have to do is go gradeless. Throw out your grade book tomorrow! In Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School, award-winning teacher and world-renowned formative assessment expert Starr Sackstein unravels one of education's oldest mysteries: how to assess learning without grades - even in a school that uses numbers, letters, GPAs, and report cards. While many educators can only muse about the possibility of a world without grades, teachers like Sackstein are reimagining education. In this unique, eagerly-anticipated book, Sackstein shows you exactly how to create a remarkable no-grades classroom like hers, a vibrant place where students grow, share, thrive, and become independent learners who never ask, "What's this worth?" Learn what formative assessment really looks like. Summative assessment is typically an end-of-unit exam or standardized test, but what is formative assessment? Many teachers struggle with the concept. Hacking Assessment not only explains what formative assessment is, it provides blueprints for implementation and examples from educators around the world, who use this strategy successfully every day.
©2015 Times 10 Publications (P)2016 Times 10 Publications
Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage
Summary
In Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage, marital psychologists John and Julie Gottman provide vital tools - scientifically based and empirically verified - that you can use to regain affection and romance lost through years of ineffective communication. In 1994, Dr. John Gottman and his colleagues at the University of Washington made a startling announcement: Through scientific observation and mathematical analysis, they could predict - with more than 90 percent accuracy - whether a marriage would succeed or fail. The only thing they did not yet know was how to turn a failing marriage into a successful one, so Gottman teamed up with his clinical psychologist wife, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, to develop intervention methods. Now the Gottmans, together with the Love Lab research facility, have put these ideas into practice. What emerged from the Gottmans’ collaboration and decades of research is a body of advice that’s based on two surprisingly simple truths: Happily married couples behave like good friends, and they handle their conflicts in gentle, positive ways. The authors offer an intimate look at 10 couples who have learned to work through potentially destructive problems - extramarital affairs, workaholism, parenthood adjustments, serious illnesses, lack of intimacy - and examine what they’ve done to improve communication and get their marriages back on track. Hundreds of thousands have seen their relationships improve thanks to the Gottmans’ work. Whether you want to make a strong relationship more fulfilling or rescue one that’s headed for disaster, Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage is essential listening.
©2006 John M. Gottman, Julie Schwartz Gottman, and Joan DeClaire (P)2006 Books on Tape
Death in Mud Lick
Summary
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Nominated for the 2021 Edgar Allan Poe Award From a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from the smallest newspaper ever to win the prize for investigative reporting, an urgent, riveting, and heartbreaking investigation into the corporate and governmental greed that pumped millions of pain pills into small Appalachian towns, decimating communities. Death in Mud Lick is the story of a pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia, that distributed 12 million opioid pain pills in three years to a town with a population of 382 people - and of one woman, desperate for justice, after losing her brother to overdose. Debbie Preece’s fight for accountability for her brother’s death took her well beyond the Sav-Rite Pharmacy in coal country, ultimately leading to three of the biggest drug wholesalers in the country. She was joined by a crusading lawyer and by local journalist, Eric Eyre, who uncovered a massive opioid pill-dumping scandal that shook the foundation of America’s largest drug companies - and won him a Pulitzer Prize. Part Erin Brockovich, part Spotlight, Death in Mud Lick details the clandestine meetings with whistleblowers; a court fight to unseal filings that the drug distributors tried to keep hidden, a push to secure the DEA pill-shipment data, and the fallout after Eyre’s local paper, the Gazette-Mail, the smallest newspaper ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, broke the story. Eyre follows the opioid shipments into individual counties, pharmacies, and homes in West Virginia and explains how they hooked thousands on prescription drugs - resulting in the highest overdose rates in the country. But despite the tragedy, there is also hope as citizens banded together to create positive change - and won. A work of deep reporting and personal conviction, Eric Eyre’s intimate portrayal of a national public health crisis illuminates the shocking pattern of corporate greed and its repercussions for the citizens of West Virginia - and the nation - to this day.
©2020 Eric Eyre (P)2020 Simon & Schuster Audio
The Ambition Decisions
Summary
"These are the 'know your value' conversations that we need to have. These women - their challenges, choices, and successes - are all of us." - Mika Brzezinski Over the last 60 years, women's lives have transformed radically from generation to generation. Without a template to follow - a way to peek into the future to catch a glimpse of what leaving this job or marrying that person might mean to us decades from now - women make important decisions blindly, groping for a way forward, winging it, and hoping it all works out. As they faced unexpectedly fraught decisions about their own lives, journalists Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace found themselves wondering about the women they'd graduated alongside. What happened to these women who seemed set to reap the rewards of second-wave feminism, on the brink of taking over the world? Where did their ambition lead them? So they tracked down their classmates and, over several hundred hours of interviews, gathered and mapped data about real women's lives that has been missing from our conversations about women and the workplace. Whether you're deciding if you should pass up a promotion in favor of more flex time, planning when to get pregnant, or wondering what the ramifications are of being the only person in your house who ever unloads the dishwasher, The Ambition Decisions is a guide to the changes that may seem arbitrary but are life defining, by women who've been there. Organized by theme, each chapter draws on real women's stories of facing down crisis, transition, and decision-making to illustrate broader trends Schank and Wallace observed. Each chapter wraps up with a useful list of questions to consider and tips to integrate that will guide women of all ages along the way to finding purpose and passion in work and life.
©2018 Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace (P)2018 Penguin Audio
I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced
Summary
Forced by her father to marry a man three times her age, young Nujood Ali was sent away from her parents and beloved sisters and made to live with her husband and his family in an isolated village in rural Yemen. There she suffered daily from physical and emotional abuse by her mother-in-law and nightly at the rough hands of her spouse. Flouting his oath to wait to have sexual relations with Nujood until she was no longer a child, he took her virginity on their wedding night. She was only 10 years old. Unable to endure the pain and distress any longer, Nujood fled, not for home, but to the courthouse of the capital, paying for a taxi ride with a few precious coins of bread money. When a renowned Yemeni lawyer heard about the young victim, she took on Nujood's case and fought the archaic system in a country where almost half the girls are married while still under the legal age. Since their unprecedented victory in April 2008, Nujood's courageous defiance of both Yemeni customs and her own family has attracted a storm of international attention. Her story even incited change in Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries, where underage marriage laws are being increasingly enforced and other child brides have been granted divorces. Recently honored alongside Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice as one of Glamour magazine's women of the year, Nujood now tells her full story for the first time. As she guides us from the magical, fragrant streets of the Old City of Sanaa to the cement-block slums and rural villages of this ancient land, her unflinching look at an injustice suffered by all too many girls around the world is at once shocking, inspiring, and utterly unforgettable.
©2010 Nujood Ali (P)2010 Random House
Mutual Aid
Summary
Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), one of the most individual political figures of his time, is best known as an influential anarchist communist. But he was also a scientist, geographer and philosopher, a man who, having grown up on his aristocratic father’s extensive country estate in Russia, had a deep understanding of and love for animals (wild and domesticated), the countryside and wildernesses. And all this was underpinned by a life committed to work for the good of humanity. Though his two best-known works, The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, are revolutionary economic texts, Mutual Aid, a collection of essays published in 1902, is a jewel of another kind. In it, Kropotkin argues that Darwin’s views on evolution and the survival of the fittest show only one aspect of life on planet Earth. Taking a kindlier - but equally scientific - look at the existence and growth of societies, both animal and human, Kropotkin takes great pains to demonstrate that the principal of mutual aid is just as important a feature in life on Earth - in fact, even more important. In this most engaging, absorbing and even endearing book, Kropotkin shows that societies evolve and develop better though the principle of mutual aid than by challenge, conflict and conquest. His chapter headings provide the overview: 'Mutual Aid Among Animals', 'Among Savages', 'Among the Barbarians', 'In the Medieval City', and 'Amongst Ourselves'. His positive and uplifting conclusion is clear: ‘In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of man, mutual support - not mutual struggle - has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.’ This humane attitude was the driver behind his politics, because Kropotkin the scientist was also very much a political personality. But Mutual Aid is endlessly entertaining and informative because it contains thousands of well-documented examples of his thesis, whether drawn from colonies of ants and bees, or ‘mutual protection among small birds; or rodents and ruminants; Bushmen, Eskimos, Caucasian mountaineers; village life in Switzerland, Germany; or from the history of Guilds and trade unions.’ Mutual Aid - A Factor of Evolution is a classic that should be far more widely known and appreciated.
Public Domain (P)2019 Ukemi Productions Ltd
Raising White Kids
Summary
Raising White Kids is a book for families, churches, educators, and communities who want to equip their children to be active and able participants in a society that is becoming one of the most racially diverse in the world while remaining full of racial tensions. For white people who are committed to equity and justice, living in a nation that remains racially unjust and deeply segregated creates unique conundrums. These conundrums begin early in life and impact the racial development of white children in powerful ways. What can we do within our homes, communities, and schools? Should we teach our children to be "color-blind"? Or should we teach them to notice race? What roles do we want to equip them to play in addressing racism when they encounter it? What strategies will help our children learn to function well in a diverse nation? Talking about race means naming the reality of white privilege and hierarchy. How do we talk about race honestly, then, without making our children feel bad about being white? Most importantly, how do we do any of this in age-appropriate ways? While a great deal of public discussion exists in regard to the impact of race and racism on children of color, meaningful dialogue about and resources for understanding the impact of race on white children are woefully absent. Raising White Kids steps into that void.
©2017 Jennifer Harvey (P)2018 Audible, Inc.
In Defense of a Liberal Education
Summary
New York Times best-selling author of The Post-American World and host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS argues for a renewed commitment to the world's most valuable educational traditions in this fascinating audiobook. The liberal arts educational system is under attack. Governors in Texas, Florida, and North Carolina have announced that they will not spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts. Majors like English and history - which were once very popular and highly respected - are in steep decline, and President Obama has recently advised students to keep in mind that technical training could be more valuable than a degree in art history when deciding on an educational path. In this timely and urgently needed audiobook, Fareed Zakaria explains that this turn away from the liberal arts is a mistake. A liberal education provides the foundation for finding your voice, writing, speaking your mind, and ultimately learning - all immensely valuable skills no matter your profession. Technology and globalization are making these skills even more valuable and necessary as routine mechanical and even computing tasks can be done by machines. More than just a path to a career, Zakaria argues that a liberal education is an exercise in freedom, and above all it feeds the most basic urge of the human spirit - to know.
©2015 Fareed Zakaria. All rights reserved. (P)2015 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Preparing to Die
Summary
We all face death, but how many of us are actually ready for it? Whether our own death or that of a loved one comes first, how prepared are we, spiritually or practically? In Preparing to Die, Andrew Holecek presents a wide array of resources to help the reader address this unfinished business. Part One shows how to prepare one’s mind and how to help others, before, during, and after death. The author explains how spiritual preparation for death can completely transform our relationship to the end of life, dissolving our fear and helping us to feel open and receptive to letting go in the dying process. Daily meditation practices, the stages of dying and how to work with them, and after-death experiences are all detailed in ways that will be particularly helpful for those with an interest in Tibetan Buddhism and in Tibetan approaches to conscious dying. Part Two addresses the practical issues that surround death. Experts in grief, hospice, the funeral business, and the medical and legal issues of death contribute chapters to prepare the listener for every practical concern, including advance directives, green funerals, the signs of death, warnings about the funeral industry, the stages of grief, and practical care for the dying. Part Three contains heart-advice from twenty of the best-known Tibetan Buddhist masters now teaching in the West. These brief interviews provide words of solace and wisdom to guide the dying and their caregivers during this challenging time. Preparing to Die is for anyone interested in learning how to prepare for death from a Buddhist perspective, both spiritually and practically. It is also for those who want to learn how to help someone else who is dying, both during the time of illness and death as well as after death.
©2013 Andrew Holecek??Excerpts from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, translated with commentary by Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa, 1975 by Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Grandstanding
Summary
We are all guilty of it. We call people terrible names in conversation or online. We vilify those with whom we disagree and make bolder claims than we could defend. We want to be seen as taking the moral high ground not just to make a point, or move a debate forward, but to look a certain way - incensed, or compassionate, or committed to a cause. We exaggerate. In other words, we grandstand. Nowhere is this more evident than in public discourse today, and especially as it plays out across the internet. To philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, who have written extensively about moral grandstanding, such one-upmanship is not just annoying, but dangerous. As politics gets more and more polarized, people on both sides of the spectrum move further and further apart when they let grandstanding get in the way of engaging one another. Drawing from work in psychology, economics, and political science, and along with contemporary examples spanning the political spectrum, the authors dive deeply into why and how we grandstand. Using the analytic tools of psychology and moral philosophy, they explain what drives us to behave in this way and what we stand to lose by taking it too far. Most importantly, they show how, by avoiding grandstanding, we can rebuild a public square worth participating in.
©2020 Oxford University Press (P)2020 Tantor