Download Latest Free Audiobooks in Non-Fiction, Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/382268 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America's Public Schools Author: Diane Ravitch Narrator: Amanda Carlin Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 17 minutes Release date: January 21, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States, Slaying Goliath is an impassioned, inspiring look at the ways in which parents, teachers, and activists are successfully fighting back to defeat the forces that are trying to privatize America’s public schools.   Diane Ravitch writes of a true grassroots movement sweeping the country, from cities and towns across America, a movement dedicated to protecting public schools from those who are funding privatization and who believe that America’s schools should be run like businesses and that children should be treated like customers or products.   Slaying Goliath is about the power of democracy, about the dangers of plutocracy, and about the potential of ordinary people—armed like David with only a slingshot of ideas, energy, and dedication—to prevail against those who are trying to divert funding away from our historic system of democratically governed, nonsectarian public schools. Among the lessons learned from the global pandemic of 2020 is the importance of our public schools and their teachers and the fact that distance learning can never replace human interaction, the pesonal connection between teachers and students.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/390182 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field Author: Howard Bryant Narrator: Ron Butler Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 19 minutes Release date: January 21, 2020 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: A bold and impassioned meditation on injustice in our country that punctures the illusion of a postracial America and reveals it as a place where authoritarianism looms large. Whether the issues are protest, labor, patriotism, or class division, it is clear that professional sports are no longer simply fun and games. Rather, the industry is a hotbed of fractures and inequities that reflect and even drive some of the most divisive issues in our country. The nine provocative and deeply personal essays in Full Dissidence confront the dangerous narratives that are shaping the current dialogue in sports and mainstream culture. The book is a reflection on a culture where African Americans continue to navigate the sharp edges of whiteness—as citizens who are always at risk of being told, often directly from the White House, to go back to where they came from. The topics Howard Bryant takes on include the player-owner relationship, the militarization of sports, the myth of integration, the erasure of black identity as a condition of success, and the kleptocracy that has forced America to ask itself if its beliefs of freedom and democracy are more than just words. In a time when authoritarianism is creeping into our lives and is being embraced in our politics, Full Dissidence will make us question the strength of the bonds we think we have with our fellow citizens, and it shows us why we must break from the malignant behaviors that have become normalized in everyday life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/387435 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties Author: Christopher Caldwell Narrator: Christopher Caldwell Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 8 minutes Release date: January 21, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.41 of Total 17 Ratings of Narrator: 4.5 of Total 4 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: A major American intellectual and “one of the right’s most gifted and astute journalists” (The New York Times Book Review) makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences and his conclusion is this: even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations. Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half-century, taking you on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycotin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules. Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement “is an eloquent and bracing book, full of insight” (New York magazine) about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/386464 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases Author: Ayelet Waldman, Michael Chabon Narrator: An All Star Cast Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 3 minutes Release date: January 21, 2020 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: The American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman in this “forceful, beautifully written” (Associated Press) collection that brings together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays “full of struggle, emotion, fear, resilience, hope, and triumph” (Los Angeles Review of Books) about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/382262 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope Author: Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn Narrator: Jennifer Garner, Sheryl Wudunn, Nicholas D. Kristof Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 43 minutes Release date: January 14, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 8 Ratings of Narrator: 2 of Total 13 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of the acclaimed, best-selling Half the Sky now issue a plea--deeply personal and told through the lives of real Americans--to address the crisis in working-class America, while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an 'other America.' The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. And while these particular stories unfolded in one corner of the country, they are representative of many places the authors write about, ranging from the Dakotas and Oklahoma to New York and Virginia. But here too are stories about resurgence, among them: Annette Dove, who has devoted her life to helping the teenagers of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as they navigate the chaotic reality of growing up poor; Daniel McDowell, of Baltimore, whose tale of opioid addiction and recovery suggests that there are viable ways to solve our nation's drug epidemic. These accounts provide a picture of working-class families needlessly but profoundly damaged as a result of decades of policy mistakes. With their superb, nuanced reportage, Kristof and WuDunn have given us a book that is both riveting and impossible to ignore.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/383851 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves Author: Rick Wilson Narrator: Rick Wilson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 12 minutes Release date: January 14, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.1 of Total 20 Ratings of Narrator: 4.67 of Total 6 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One of the founders of The Lincoln Project, the bestselling author of Everything Trump Touches Dies is back with a guidebook for beating Trump’s tricks, traps, and tweets in 2020.    “If you believe America’s future depends on Donald Trump’s political machine being crushed at the polls next year, then Rick Wilson’s Running Against the Devil is a must-read.”—Joe Scarborough, MSNBC Donald Trump is exactly the disaster we feared for America. Hated by a majority of Americans, Trump’s administration is rocked by daily scandals, and he’s embarrassed us at home and abroad.   Trump can’t win in 2020, right?    Wrong. As 2016 proved, Trump can’t win, but the Democrats can sure as hell lose. Only one thing can save Trump, and that’s a Democratic candidate who runs the race Trump wants them to run instead of the campaign they must run to win in 2020.   Wilson combines decades of national political experience and insight in his take-no-prisoners analysis, hammering Trump’s destructive and dangerous first term in a case-by-case takedown of the worst president in history and describing the terrifying prospect of four more years of Trump.    Like no one else can, Wilson blows the lid off Trump’s 2020 Republican war machine, showing the exact strategies and tactics they’ll use against the Democratic nominee . . . and how the Democrats can avoid the catastrophe waiting for them if they fall into Trump’s trap.   Running Against the Devil is sharply funny, brutally honest, and infused with Wilson’s biting commentary. It’s a vital indictment of Trump, a no-nonsense, no-holds-barred road map to saving America, and the guide to making Donald Trump a one-term president.    The stakes are too high to do anything less.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/385510 to listen full audiobooks. Title: State of War: MS-13 and El Salvador's World of Violence Author: William Wheeler Narrator: William Wheeler Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 3 hours 13 minutes Release date: January 14, 2020 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: The real story behind El Salvador's MS-13 gang and how they have perpetuated three generations of conflict and led to scores of migrants seeking a new life in the United States. Born in Los Angeles, the gang MS-13 was founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran refugees who had been hardened in a civil war stoked by American foreign policy. But the gang found its way home a decade later, as the U.S. began deporting thousands of convicts each year back to the Northern Triangle--El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Today, those countries share the world's highest murder rates, and account for 70 percent of the migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border. Foreign correspondent William Wheeler tracks MS-13 from L.A., where he meets the founders of the gang, to El Salvador, where three generations of Salvadorans have been drawn into an escalating cycle of conflict. State of War tells the tragic story of a brutal civil war that has never ended.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/387177 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia Author: Joshua Yaffa Narrator: Fred Sanders Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 15 hours 0 minutes Release date: January 14, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • “Unforgettable . . . a book about Putin’s Russia that is unlike any other.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain From a Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker, a groundbreaking portrait of modern Russia and the inner struggles of the people who sustain Vladimir Putin’s rule   ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—NPR, Kirkus Reviews In this rich and novelistic tour of contemporary Russia, Joshua Yaffa introduces readers to some of the country’s most remarkable figures—from politicians and entrepreneurs to artists and historians—who have built their careers and constructed their identities in the shadow of the Putin system. Torn between their own ambitions and the omnipresent demands of the state, each walks an individual path of compromise. Some muster cunning and cynicism to extract all manner of benefits and privileges from those in power. Others, finding themselves to be less adept, are left broken and demoralized. What binds them together is the tangled web of dilemmas and contradictions they face.   Between Two Fires chronicles the lives of a number of strivers who understand that their dreams are best—or only—realized through varying degrees of cooperation with the Russian government. With sensitivity and depth, Yaffa profiles the director of the country’s main television channel, an Orthodox priest at war with the church hierarchy, a Chechen humanitarian who turns a blind eye to persecutions, and many others. The result is an intimate and probing portrait of a nation that is much discussed yet little understood. By showing how citizens shape their lives around the demands of a capricious and frequently repressive state—as often by choice as under threat of force—Yaffa offers urgent lessons about the true nature of modern authoritarianism. Praise for Between Two Fires “A deep and revealing portrait of life inside Vladimir Putin’s Russia. . . . Yaffa mines a rich vein, describing his subjects’ moral compromises and often ingenious ways of engaging a crooked bureaucracy to show how the Kremlin sustains its authoritarianism.”—The New York Times Book Review “Few journalists have penetrated so deep and with so much nuance into the moral ambiguities of Russia. If you want insight into the deeper distortions the Kremlin causes in people’s psyches this book is invaluable.”—Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible   “A stunning chronicle of Putin’s new Russia . . . It celebrates the vitality of the Russian people even as it explores the compromises and accommodations that they must make. . . . This embrace of contradictions is what makes Between Two Fires such a poignant and poetic book.”—Alex Gibney, Air Mail

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/386444 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Trade is Not a Four-Letter Word: How Six Everyday Products Make the Case for Trade Author: Fred P. Hochberg Narrator: Fred P. Hochberg Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 59 minutes Release date: January 14, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: “A sprightly and clear-eyed testimonial to the value of globalization” (The Wall Street Journal) as seen through six surprising everyday goods—the taco salad, the Honda Odyssey, the banana, the iPhone, the college degree, and the blockbuster HBO series Game of Thrones. Trade allows us to sell what we produce at home and purchase what we don’t. It lowers prices and gives us greater variety and innovation. Yet understanding our place in the global trade network is rarely simple. Trade has become an easy excuse for struggling economies, a scapegoat for our failures to adapt to a changing world, and—for many Americans on both the right and the left—nothing short of a four-letter word. But as Fred P. Hochberg reminds us, trade is easier to understand than we commonly think. In Trade Is Not a Four-Letter Word, you’ll learn how NAFTA became a populist punching bag on both sides of the aisle. You’ll learn how Americans can avoid the grim specter of the $10 banana. And you’ll finally discover the truth about whether or not, as President Trump has famously tweeted, “trade wars are good and easy to win.” (Spoiler alert—they aren’t.) Hochberg debunks common trade myths by pulling back the curtain on six everyday products, each with a surprising story to tell: the taco salad, the Honda Odyssey, the banana, the iPhone, the college degree, and the smash hit HBO series Game of Thrones. Behind these six examples are stories that help explain not only how trade has shaped our lives so far but also how we can use trade to build a better future for our own families, for America, and for the world. Trade Is Not a Four-Letter Word is the antidote to today’s acronym-laden trade jargon pitched to voters with simple promises that rarely play out so one-dimensionally. Packed with colorful examples and highly digestible explanations, Trade Is Not a Four-Letter Word is “an accessible, necessary book that will increase our understanding of trade and economic policies and the ways in which they impact our daily lives” (Library Journal, starred review).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/387432 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Politics is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change Author: Eitan Hersh Narrator: Jonathan Todd Ross Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 47 minutes Release date: January 14, 2020 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 2 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: A groundbreaking analysis of political hobbyism—treating politics like a spectator sport—and an urgent and timely call to arms for the many well-meaning, well-informed citizens who follow political news, but do not take political action. Do you consider yourself politically engaged? Probably, yes! But are you, really? The uncomfortable truth is that most of us have good intentions. We vote (sometimes) and occasionally sign a petition or attend a rally. But we mainly “engage” by consuming politics as if it’s entertainment or a hobby. We obsessively follow the news and complain about the opposition to our friends or spouse. We tweet and post and share. The hours we spend on politics are used mainly as pastime. Instead, political scientist and data analyst Eitan Hersh offers convincing evidence that we should be spending the same number of hours building political organizations, implementing a long-term vision for our local communities, and getting to know our neighbors, whose votes will be needed for solving hard problems. We could be accumulating power so that when there are opportunities to make a difference—to lobby, to advocate, to mobilize—we will be ready. Aided by cutting-edge social science as well as remarkable stories of ordinary citizens who got off their couches and took political power seriously, this book shows us how to channel our energy away from political hobbyism and toward empowering our values. In an age of political turmoil and as the 2020 election looms, Politics Is for Power is an inspiring, vital read that will make you hopeful for America’s democratic future.