Access Must-Have Full Audiobooks in Non-Fiction, Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

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Title: Democracy Rules

Author: Jan-Werner Müller

Narrator: Raj Ghatak

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 54 minutes

Release date: July 6, 2021

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Brought to you by Penguin. One of our most essential political thinkers offers a vital account of democracy in the twenty-first century Everyone knows that democracy is in trouble, but do we know what democracy actually is? Political philosopher Jan-Werner Müller, author of the widely acclaimed What Is Populism?, takes us back to basics. In this short, elegant volume, he explains how democracy is founded on three vital principles: liberty, equality, and also uncertainty. The latter, he argues, is crucial for ensuring democracy's dynamic and creative character. Authoritarians, as well as Big Tech, seek to render politics (and individual citizens) predictable; democracy holds open the possibility that new ideas, movements and identities can be created. Acknowledging fully the dangers posed by populism, by kleptocratic autocracies like Russia's and by the digital authoritarianism of Xi, Müller also challenges the assumptions made by many liberals defending democracy in recent years. He shows how the secession of plutocratic elites in the West has undermined much of democracy's promise. In response, we need to re-invigorate our institutions, especially political parties and professional media, but also make it easier for citizens to mobilize. Taking on many of the most difficult political questions we face, this book is a vital rethinking of what democracy is, and how we can reinvent our social contract. © Jan-Werner Müller 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/514045 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War

Author: Luke A. Nichter

Narrator: Rick Adamson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 17 hours 32 minutes

Release date: June 29, 2021

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Few have ever enjoyed the degree of foreign-policy influence and versatility that Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. did. For three decades, he was at the center of American foreign policy, serving as advisor to five presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford, and as ambassador to the United Nations, Vietnam, West Germany, and the Vatican. He entered Eisenhower in the 1952 New Hampshire primary without the candidate's knowledge, crafted his political positions, and managed his campaign. As UN ambassador in the 1950s, Lodge was effectively a second secretary of state. In the 1960s, he was called twice, by John F. Kennedy and by Lyndon Johnson, to serve in the toughest position in the State Department's portfolio, as ambassador to Vietnam. In the 1970s, he paved the way for permanent American ties with the Holy See. In this book, historian Luke A. Nichter gives us a compelling narrative of Lodge's extraordinary and consequential life. Lodge was among the last of the well-heeled Eastern Establishment Republicans who put duty over partisanship and saw themselves as the hereditary captains of the American state. Unlike many who reach his position, Lodge took his secrets to the grave—including some that, revealed here for the first time, will force historians to rethink their understanding of America's involvement in the Vietnam War.

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Title: Fair Pay: How to Get a Raise, Close the Wage Gap, and Build Stronger Businesses

Author: David Buckmaster

Narrator: Joe Knezevich

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 11 minutes

Release date: June 29, 2021

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

An expert takes on the crisis of income inequality, addressing the problems with our current compensation model, demystifying pay practices, and providing practical information employees can use when negotiating their salaries and discussing how we can close the gender and racial pay gap. American workers are suffering economically and fewer are earning a living wage. The situation is only worsening. We do not have a common language to talk about pay, how it works at most companies, or a cohesive set of practical solutions for making pay more fair. Most blame the greed of America’s executive class, the ineptitude of government, or a general lack of personal motivation.  But the negative effects of income inequality are a problem that can be solved. We don’t have to choose between effective government policy and the free market, between the working class and the job creators, or between socialism and capitalism, David Buckmaster, the Director of Global Compensation for Nike, argues. We do not have to give up on fixing what people are paid. Ideas like Universal Basic Income will not be enough to avoid the severe cultural disruption coming our way. Buckmaster examines income inequality through the design and distribution of income itself. He explains why businesses are producing no meaningful wage growth, regardless of the unemployment rate and despite sitting on record piles of cash and the lowest tax rates[0] in a generation . He pulls back the curtain on how corporations make decisions about wages and provides practical solutions—as well as the corporate language—workers need to get the best results when talking about money with a boss.  The way pay works now will not overcome our most persistent pay challenges, including low and stagnant wages, unequal pay by race and gender, and executive pay levels untethered from the realities of the average worker. The compensation system is working as designed, but that system is broken.  Fair Pay opens the corporate black box of pay decisions to show why businesses pay what they pay and how to make them pay more.  Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

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Title: The Child in the Electric Chair: The Execution of George Junius Stinney Jr. and the Making of a Tragedy in the American South

Author: Eli Faber

Narrator: Beresford Bennett, Karen Chilton

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 5 hours 47 minutes

Release date: June 25, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

At 7:30 a.m. on June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinney Jr. was escorted by four guards to the death chamber. Wearing socks but no shoes, the 14-year-old Black boy walked with his Bible tucked under his arm. The guards strapped his slight, five-foot-one-inch frame into the electric chair. His small size made it difficult to affix the electrode to his right leg and the face mask, which was clearly too large, fell to the floor when the executioner flipped the switch. That day, George Stinney became, and today remains, the youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth century.How was it possible, even in Jim Crow South Carolina, for a child to be convicted, sentenced to death, and executed based on circumstantial evidence in a trial that lasted only a few hours? Through extensive archival research and interviews with Stinney's contemporaries?men and women alive today who still carry distinctive memories of the events that rocked the small town of Alcolu and the entire state?Eli Faber pieces together the chain of events that led to this tragic injustice.The first book to fully explore the events leading to Stinney's death, The Child in the Electric Chair offers a compelling narrative with a meticulously researched analysis of the world in which Stinney lived?the era of lynching, segregation, and racist assumptions about Black Americans. Faber explains how a systemically racist system, paired with the personal ambitions of powerful individuals, turned a blind eye to human decency and one of the basic tenets of the American legal system that individuals are innocent until proven guilty.As society continues to grapple with the legacies of racial injustice, the story of George Stinney remains one that can teach us lessons about our collective past and present. By ably placing the Stinney case into a larger context, Faber reveals how this case is not just a travesty of justice locked in the era of the Jim Crow South but rather one that continues to resonate in our own time.

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Title: These Liberties We Hold Sacred: Essays on Faith and Citizenship in the 21st Century

Author: Carl Anderson

Narrator: Jim Denison

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 30 minutes

Release date: June 22, 2021

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

By the time our Founding Fathers were ready to establish an independent nation, the idea of religious tolerance had become deeply ingrained in this brave new country's design. So much so that when the United States Constitution was ratified, it contained a document known as The Bill of Rights—ten amendments detailing the rights of this country's citizens. And the very First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . . .” Over the past few decades, however, the power of the state has usurped a growing number of rights clearly ascribed to those who wish to practice their faith. This has certainly not gone unnoticed by many religious organizations. As the supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus, Carl Anderson has taken an active role in highlighting—and protecting against—this ever-growing governmental infringement over fundamental religious freedom. New York Times bestselling author Carl Anderson has gathered together many of his most thought-provoking speeches, articles, and essays that lay bare the facts of this unjustified restriction of religious beliefs. The power of his words makes it clear that if nothing is done now, there will continue to be more erosion of these special freedoms set forth by our Founding Fathers.

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Title: Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

Author: Michael Knowles

Narrator: Michael Knowles

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 24 minutes

Release date: June 22, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 10

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 6

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

“Political correctness” has taken politeness and turned it into a weapon of censorship and intimidation. In the workplace, on social media, and even at the dinner table, Americans are confronted daily with a laundry list of words they’re “not allowed” to say—and that list is updated constantly and without warning. How did so absurd a concept become so dangerous—and come to dominate our public discourse over the last quarter-century? In Speechless, #1 nationally bestselling author and political commentator Michael Knowles masterfully traces the history and effects of political correctness from the early twentieth century to the present, revealing its insidious roots, exposing the power-hungry language architects behind its ever-growing control, and examining what this concerted manipulation of speech means for the future of American culture, politics, and minds.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/506175 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Author: Kate Masur

Narrator: Allyson Johnson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 14 hours 15 minutes

Release date: June 22, 2021

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, north and south, in the decades before the Civil War. The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states, claiming the authority to maintain the domestic peace, enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling their boundaries and restricted the rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states' insistence on local control with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement's vision became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement.

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Title: Drone Wars: Pioneers, Killing Machines, Artificial Intelligence, and the Battle for the Future

Author: Seth J. Frantzman

Narrator: Jonathan Todd Ross

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 51 minutes

Release date: June 22, 2021

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Drones are transforming warfare through the use of artificial intelligence, drone swarms, and surveillance—leading to competition between the US, China, Israel, and Iran. Who will be the next drone superpower? In the battle for the streets of Mosul in Iraq, drones in the hands of ISIS terrorists made life hell for the Iraq army and civilians. Today, defense companies are racing to develop the lasers, microwave weapons, and technology necessary for confronting the next drone threat. Seth J. Frantzman takes the reader from the midnight exercises with Israel’s elite drone warriors, to the CIA headquarters where new drone technology was once adopted in the 1990s to hunt Osama bin Laden. This rapidly expanding technology could be used to target nuclear power plants and pose a threat to civilian airports. In the Middle East, the US used a drone to kill Iranian arch-terrorist Qasem Soleimani, a key Iranian commander. Drones are transforming the battlefield from Syria to Libya and Yemen. For militaries and security agencies—the main users of expensive drones—the UAV market is expanding as well; there were more than 20,000 military drones in use by 2020. Once the province of only a few militaries, drones now being built in Turkey, China, Russia, and smaller countries like Taiwan may be joining the military drone market. It’s big business, too—$100 billion will be spent over the next decade on drones. Militaries may soon be spending more on drones than tanks, much as navies transitioned away from giant vulnerable battleships to more agile ships. The future wars will be fought with drones and won by whoever has the most sophisticated technology.

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Title: The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream

Author: Jason Vuic

Narrator: Mike Chamberlain

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 35 minutes

Release date: June 21, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.33 of Total 3

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Florida has long beckoned retirees seeking to spend their golden years in the sun, but, for many, the American dream of owning a home there was financially impossible. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called 'installment land sales industry' appeared out of nowhere to hawk billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded homesite that would be waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build. The result created Cape Coral, Port St. Lucie, Deltona, Port Charlotte, Palm Coast, and Spring Hill, among many others—sprawling exurban communities with no downtowns and little industry but millions of residential lots. As Jason Vuic recounts in this raucous history, these communities allowed generations of northerners to move to Florida cheaply, but at a price: high-pressure sales tactics begat fraud; poor urban planning begat sprawl; developers cleared forests, drained wetlands, and built thousands of miles of roads in grid-like subdivisions, which, fifty years later, played an inordinate role in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/508363 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law

Author: Randall Kennedy

Narrator: Amani Starnes

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 32 minutes

Release date: June 15, 2021

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

The definitive reckoning with Affirmative Action, one of America’s most explosively contentious and divisive issues—from “one of our most important and perceptive writers on race and the law.”—The Washington Post “A clear-eyed take on America’s battle over affirmative action and diversity.... [Kennedy] goes straight at the issue with fearlessness and a certain cheekiness.” —Los Angeles Times “Compelling.... Powerful.” —Wall Street Journal What precisely is affirmative action, and why is it fiercely championed by some and just as fiercely denounced by others? Does it signify a boon or a stigma? Or is it simply reverse discrimination? What are its benefits and costs to American society? What are the exact indicia determining who should or should not be accorded affirmative action? When should affirmative action end, if it must? Randall Kennedy gives us a concise and deeply personal overview of the policy, refusing to shy away from the myriad complexities of an issue that continues to bedevil American race relations.