Download Best Full Audiobooks in Non-Fiction, Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/741563 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Lawfare: Law as a Weapon of War

Author: Orde F. Kittrie

Narrator: Brian P. Craig

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 21 hours 28 minutes

Release date: June 11, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

In this book, author Orde Kittrie draws on his experiences as a lawfare practitioner, US State Department attorney, and international law scholar in analyzing the theory and practice of lawfare. Kittrie explains how factors including the increased reach of international laws and tribunals and the rise of economic globalization and information technology have fueled lawfare's increasing power and prevalence. The book includes case studies of recent offensive and defensive lawfare by the United States, China, all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and several non-governmental organizations and individuals. Kittrie asserts that much of the United States' most effective and creative lawfare today is being waged by private sector or other non-governmental attorneys. He analyzes why this is the case, and describes how such attorneys' expertise and experience can contribute even more to US national security. Kittrie also explains that lawfare, deployed more systematically and adeptly by the US government, could likely reduce US and foreign casualties, and save US taxpayer dollars, by supplementing or replacing the use of armed force as a tool for achieving some significant US national security objectives. Understanding this alternative to armed force has never been more important.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/735480 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: What Went Wrong with Capitalism

Author: Ruchir Sharma

Narrator: Fajer Al-Kaisi

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 19 minutes

Release date: June 11, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

An “eye-opening” (The New York Times), “absolutely fascinating” (Fareed Zakaria, CNN host and commentator) look at a how a century of expanding government has distorted financial markets, stoked massive inequality, and soaked America in debt. Capitalism didn’t fail, it was ruined… What went wrong with capitalism? Ruchir Sharma’s account is not like any you will have heard before. He says progressives are right, in part, when they mock modern capitalism as “socialism for the rich.” For a century, governments have expanded in just about every measurable dimension, from spending to regulation and the scale of financial rescues when the economy wobbles. The result is expensive state guarantees for everyone—bailouts for the rich, entitlements for the middle class, welfare for the poor. Taking you back to the 19th century, Sharma shows how completely the reflexes of government have changed: from hands-off to hands-on, from doing too little to help anyone in hard times to today trying to prevent anyone suffering any economic pain, ever. Trading sins of omission and indifference for excesses of spending and meddling, governments from the United States to Europe and Japan have pumped so much money into their economies that financial markets can no longer invest all that capital efficiently. Inadvertently, they have fueled the rise of monopolies, “zombie” firms, and billionaires. They have made capitalism less fair and less efficient, which is slowing economic growth and fueling popular anger. The first step to a cure is a correct diagnosis of the problem. Capitalism has been badly distorted by constant government intervention and the relentless spread of a bailout culture. Building an even bigger state will only double down on what ruined capitalism in the first place. What Went Wrong with Capitalism is a “superbly written” (The Wall Street Journal), “fresh and accessible” (Robert Rubin, former Secretary of the Treasury and chairman of Citigroup) look at the issues confronting our capitalistic society and will ultimately reshape how you think about world.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/733671 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey through Occupied Myanmar

Author: Clare Hammond

Narrator: Clare Hammond

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 8 minutes

Release date: June 6, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Brought to you by Penguin. In 2016, while working as a journalist in Yangon, Clare Hammond discovered an obscure map that showed a web of new railways spanning the length and breadth of the country - railways not shown on any other publicly available maps. She was determined to uncover the railways' origins, purpose, and most of all, the silence that surrounded them. She would spend three months travelling on these mysterious railways, and the next five years piecing their story together. Her journey would take her from Myanmar's tropical south to the embattled mountain towns that border India and China. In dilapidated carriages, along tracks in disrepair, through contested ethnic states and former sites of forced labour, visiting temples, tea shops and festivals, Clare encountered a colourful and contradictory Myanmar through the stories of its people. Simultaneously a lush and evocative travelogue, an unsparing account of Myanmar's recent history, and an astonishing, conversation-shifting engagement with Britain's colonial legacy, On the Shadow Tracks is that rare and necessary thing: a book that finds and tells the truth. ©2024 Clare Hammond (P) 2024 Penguin Audio

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/723132 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World--And What We Can Do

Author: Steven Brill

Narrator: Dan Woren

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 32 minutes

Release date: June 4, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

How did we become a world where facts—shared truths—have lost their power to hold us together as a community, as a country, globally? How have we allowed the proliferation of alternative facts, hoaxes, even conspiracy theories, to destroy our trust in institutions, leaders, and legitimate experts? Best-selling journalist Steven Brill documents the forces and people, from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue to Moscow to Washington, that have created and exploited this world of chaos and division—and offers practical solutions for what we can do about it. 'A precise description of the punishment cell we have built around our minds and the first few steps back towards light and air.' –Timothy Snyder, Author of On Tyranny and Professor of History, Yale University “A seminal, ground-breaking, documented and honest examination of two of the central dilemmas of our time—what is truth and where to find it.” —Bob Woodward, associate editor at The Washington Post As the cofounder of NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, Steven Brill has observed the rise of fake news from a front-row seat. In The Death of Truth, with startling, often terrifying clarity, he explains how we got here—and how we can get back to a world where truth matters. None of this—conspiracy theories embraced, expertise ridiculed, empirical evidence ignored—has happened by accident. Brill takes us inside the decisions made by executives in Silicon Valley to code the algorithms embedded in their social media platforms to maximize profits by pushing divisive content. He unravels the ingenious creation of automated advertising buying systems that reward that click-baiting content and penalize reliable news publishers, and describes how the use of these ad-financed, misinformation platforms by politicians, hucksters, and conspiracy theorists deceives ordinary citizens. He documents how the most powerful adversaries of America have used American-made social media and advertising tools against us with massive disinformation campaigns—and how, with the development of generative artificial intelligence, everything could get exponentially worse unless we act. The stakes are high for all of us, including Brill himself, whose company's role in exposing Russian disinformation operations resulted in a Russian agent targeting him and his family. Crucially, Brill lays out a series of provocative but realistic prescriptions for what we can do now to reverse course—proposals certain to stir debate and even action that could curb the power of big tech to profit from division and chaos, tamp down polarization, and restore the trust necessary to bring us together.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/734323 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: What This Comedian Said Will Shock You

Author: Bill Maher

Narrator: Bill Maher

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 50 minutes

Release date: May 21, 2024

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.75 of Total 28

Ratings of Narrator: 4.67 of Total 12

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

The hilarious and controversial host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher has written his funniest, most opinionated, and most necessary book ever—a brilliantly astute and acerbically funny vivisection of American life, politics, and culture. Some of the smartest commentary about what’s happening in America is coming from a comedian—this comedian being Bill Maher. If you want to understand what’s wrong with this country, it turns out that one of the best informed and most thought-provoking analysts is this very funny pothead. The book was inspired by the “editorial” Bill delivers at the end of each episode of Real Time. These editorials are direct-to-camera sermons about culture, politics, and what’s happening in the world. To put this book together, Maher reviewed more than a decade of his editorials, rewriting, reimagining, and updating them, and adding new material to speak exactly to the moment we’re in. Free speech, cops, drugs, race, religion, the generations, cancel culture, the parties, the media, show biz, romance, health—Maher covers it all. The result is a hugely entertaining work of commentary about American culture in the tradition of Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and H. L. Mencken.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/730516 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture

Author: Alexandra Filindra

Narrator: Peter Berkrot

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 14 hours 21 minutes

Release date: May 21, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

An eye-opening examination of the ties between American gun culture and white male supremacy from the American Revolution to today. One-third of American adults—approximately 86 million people—own firearms. This is not just for protection or hunting. Although many associate gun-centric ideology with individualist and libertarian traditions in American political culture, Race, Rights, and Rifles shows that it rests on an equally old but different foundation. Instead, Alexandra Frilindra shows that American gun culture can be traced back to the American Revolution when republican notions of civic duty were fused with a belief in white male supremacy and a commitment to maintaining racial and gender hierarchies. Drawing on wide-ranging historical and contemporary evidence, Race, Rights, and Rifles traces how this ideology emerged during the Revolution and became embedded in America's institutions, from state militias to the National Rifle Association (NRA). Utilizing original survey data, Filindra reveals how many white Americans—including those outside of the NRA's direct orbit—embrace these beliefs, and as a result, they are more likely than other Americans to value gun rights over voting rights, embrace antidemocratic norms, and justify political violence.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/738508 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs

Author: George Fisher

Narrator: Jonathan Yen

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 21 hours 32 minutes

Release date: May 14, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Beware Euphoria uncovers the roots of America's moral obsession with drug regulation, offering a lively and fascinating history of the nation's racialized fear of intoxication. Challenging the idea that early antidrug laws in the United States arose from racial animus, George Fisher instead shows in textured detail how United States drug laws were driven by a deep-seated cultural taboo against euphoria and a preoccupation with white moral integrity. From nineteenth-century opium dens to the war on cocaine and cannabis, and more, Fisher offers a vivid tour of the sites of conflict, along with a convincing case for how the moral discourses and social contexts of the day pit drugs against the law. Bringing this history up to the present, Fisher shows how the racial dynamic has changed dramatically. As harsher penalties swell prisons with mostly nonwhite dealers, antidrug laws have come under renewed scrutiny as a tool of racial oppression. The book closes with an examination of cannabis legalization, driven in part by the movement for racial justice.

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Title: Kennan: A Life between Worlds

Author: Frank Costigliola

Narrator: Paul Brion

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 22 hours 33 minutes

Release date: May 14, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904–2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy. Drawing on many previously untapped sources, Frank Costigliola's biography offers a new picture of a man of extraordinary ability and ambition whose idea of containing the Soviet Union helped ignite the Cold War but who spent the next half century trying to extinguish it. Always prescient, Kennan in the 1990s warned that the eastward expansion of NATO would spur a new cold war with Russia. Even as Kennan championed rational realism in foreign policy, his personal and professional lives were marked by turmoil. And though he was widely respected and honored by presidents and the public, he judged his career a failure because he had been dropped as a pilot of US foreign policy. Kennan was a trenchant critic of both communism and capitalism, and a pioneering environmentalist. Living between Russia and the US, he witnessed firsthand Stalin's tightening grip on the Soviet Union, the collapse of Europe during WWII, and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. An absorbing portrait of an eloquent, insightful, and sometimes blinkered iconoclast whose ideas are still powerfully relevant, Kennan invites us to imagine a world that Kennan fought for but was unable to bring about—one not of confrontations and crises but of dialogue and diplomacy.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/745336 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics

Author: Sam Rosenfeld, Daniel Schlozman

Narrator: Tom Beyer

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 14 hours 33 minutes

Release date: May 7, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

America's political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes listeners from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today's parties, overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld paint unforgettable portraits of figures such as Martin Van Buren, whose pioneering Democrats invented the machinery of the mass political party, and Abraham Lincoln and other heroic Republicans of that party's first generation who stood up to the Slave Power. And they show how today's fractious party politics arose from the ashes of the New Deal order in the 1970s. Activists in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention transformed presidential nominations but failed to lay the foundations for robust, movement-driven parties. Instead, modern American conservatism hollowed out the party system. Party hollowness lies at the heart of our democratic discontents. With historical sweep and political acuity, The Hollow Parties offers answers to pressing questions about how the nation's parties became so dysfunctional—and how they might yet realize their promise.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/742965 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Author: Eugene Rogan

Narrator: Ronan Summers

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 7 minutes

Release date: May 7, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

An award-winning scholar’s account of an ancient city’s descent into unprecedented communal violence—an event that would mark the end of the old Ottoman order and the beginning of the modern Middle East On July 9, 1860, a violent mob swept through the Christian quarters of Damascus. For eight days, violence raged, leaving five thousand Christians dead, thousands of shops looted, and churches, houses, and monasteries razed. The sudden and ferocious outbreak shocked the world, leaving Syrian Christians vulnerable and fearing renewed violence.    Drawn from never-before-seen eyewitness accounts of the Damascus Events, eminent Middle East historian Eugene Rogan tells the story of how a peaceful multicultural city came to be engulfed in slaughter. He traces how rising tensions between Muslim and Christian communities led some to regard extermination as a reasonable solution. Rogan also narrates the wake of this disaster, and how the Ottoman government moved quickly to retake control of the city, end the violence, and reintegrate Christians into the community. These efforts to rebuild Damascus proved successful, preserving peace for the next 150 years until 2011.    The Damascus Events offers a vivid history, one that masterfully uncovers the outbreak of violence that unmade a great city and examines the possibility, even after searing conflict and unimaginable tragedy, of repair.