Explore the Latest Full Audiobooks in Non-Fiction, Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/596436 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?

Author: Daniel Chandler

Narrator: Daniel Chandler

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 19 minutes

Release date: April 20, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Brought to you by Penguin. Despite the enormous problems we face and widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, it's surprisingly hard to find a coherent vision of what a better, fairer society would look like. Free and Equal provides that vision. In this hugely ambitious and exhilarating debut, philosopher and economist Daniel Chandler argues that the ideas we need are hiding in plain sight, in the work of the twentieth century's greatest political philosopher, John Rawls. Although they have transformed philosophy, his ideas have had little impact on politics - until now. In Free and Equal, Chandler shows us how they offer an intuitive yet powerful framework for addressing the urgent challenges we face, and an unparalleled resource for developing a transformative progressive politics. Taking Rawls's humane and egalitarian liberalism as his starting point, and drawing on evidence from the social sciences and on inspiring examples from around the world, Chandler builds a careful and ultimately irresistible case for fundamentally re-designing our basic institutions - from how we can protect basic freedoms of speech, religion and sexuality whilst transcending the culture wars, to a completely new way of funding political parties and the media, to an economic agenda that would give everyone a fair share not just of income and wealth, but of power and control, dignity and self-respect. This is a book brimming with hope and possibility - a much-needed alternative to the cynicism that pervades our politics, setting out a 'realistic utopia' that can galvanise people from all walks of life. Free and Equal has the potential not only to transform contemporary debate, but to offer a touchstone for a modern, egalitarian liberalism for many years to come, cementing Rawls's place in political discourse, and firmly establishing Chandler as a vital new voice for our time. ©2023 Daniel Chandler (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/612788 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Between Good and Evil: The Stolen Girls of Boko Haram

Author: Mellissa Fung

Narrator: Janina Edwards

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 51 minutes

Release date: April 18, 2023

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER “This work is important and astonishing, but it is also a riveting read.” —Louise Penny, author of A World of Curiosities and the Inspector Gamache novels Behind the Beautiful Forevers meets Under an Afghan Sky in this mesmerizing true story of the Nigerian girls taken captive by the terrorist group Boko Haram In April 2014, the world awoke to the shocking news that the terrorist group Boko Haram had kidnapped nearly 300 school-aged girls and taken them deep into the forests of Nigeria. When veteran journalist Mellissa Fung travelled to Nigeria, she discovered that the scope of the kidnappings had been vastly under-reported. Hundreds—possibly thousands—more girls had been taken against their will and forced to become child brides to soldiers and leaders of Boko Haram. Some of the captives escaped and returned to their villages, many with children in tow. Most of these girls, still children themselves, were shunned by their former friends and family. Other girls have never been seen again. A former captive herself, Mellissa Fung has great empathy for the kidnapped girls. Taken by Taliban sympathizers in Afghanistan, Fung shared her experience in her number-one-bestselling book, Under an Afghan Sky: A Memoir of Captivity. During several visits to Nigeria over four years, she sat down with the girls and their families and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews, listening to horrific stories of capture, rape and torture, as well as escapes and excommunications. Fung tells the stories of Gambo, Asma’u, Zara and other girls taken by Boko Haram. She also portrays strong women fighting against the terrorist group in their own powerful ways: Aisha the Hunter, who moves stealthily into the forest, taking out Boko Haram with her faithful followers, and Mama Boko Haram, an Igbo woman who knows the fighters and those haunted by their experiences and fights to empty the forests of fighters and captives alike. This is raw, honest and heartbreaking storytelling at its best.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/604336 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

Author: Jonathan Kennedy

Narrator: Jonathan Kennedy

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 23 minutes

Release date: April 18, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 2

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “gripping” (The Washington Post) account of how the major transformations in history—from the rise of Homo sapiens to the birth of capitalism—have been shaped not by humans but by germs “Superbly written . . . Kennedy seamlessly weaves together scientific and historical research, and his confident authorial voice is sure to please readers of Yuval Noah Harari or Rutger Bregman.”—The Times (U.K.) According to the accepted narrative of progress, humans have thrived thanks to their brains and brawn, collectively bending the arc of history. But in this revelatory book, Professor Jonathan Kennedy argues that the myth of human exceptionalism overstates the role that we play in social and political change. Instead, it is the humble microbe that wins wars and topples empires. Drawing on the latest research in fields ranging from genetics and anthropology to archaeology and economics, Pathogenesis takes us through sixty thousand years of history, exploring eight major outbreaks of infectious disease that have made the modern world. Bacteria and viruses were protagonists in the demise of the Neanderthals, the growth of Islam, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the devastation wrought by European colonialism, and the evolution of the United States from an imperial backwater to a global superpower. Even Christianity rose to prominence in the wake of a series of deadly pandemics that swept through the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries: Caring for the sick turned what was a tiny sect into one of the world’s major religions. By placing disease at the center of his wide-ranging history of humankind, Kennedy challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions about our collective past—and urges us to view this moment as another disease-driven inflection point that will change the course of history. Provocative and brimming with insight, Pathogenesis transforms our understanding of the human story.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/612322 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe

Author: Milan Kundera

Narrator: Charles Constant

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 1 hour 25 minutes

Release date: April 11, 2023

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

“We should welcome the context Kundera gives for the struggles between Russia and Europe, and the plight of those caught between them. His defense of small languages, small cultures, and small nations feels pressing.”—Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine “Kundera focuses on the relationship of Europe’s central ‘small nations’ like Czechoslovakia and Ukraine to Western culture and argues that their cultural identities were increasingly threatened.”—New York Book Review  A short collection of brilliant early essays that offers a fascinating context for Milan Kundera’s subsequent career and holds a mirror to much recent European history.  It is also remarkably prescient with regard to Russia’s current aggression in Ukraine and its threat to the rest of Europe. Milan Kundera’s early nonfiction work feels especially resonant in our own time. In these pieces, Kundera pleads the case of the “small nations” of Europe who, by culture, are Western with deep roots in Europe, despite Russia imposing its own Communist political regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Kundera warns that the real tragedy here is not Russia but Europe, whose own identity and culture are directly challenged and threatened in a way that could lead to their destruction. He is sounding the alarm, which chimes loud and clear in our own twenty-first century. The 1983 essay translated by Edmund White (“The Tragedy of Central Europe”), and the 1967 lecture delivered to the Czech Writers’ Union in the middle of the Prague Spring by the young Milan Kundera (“Literature and the Small Nations”), translated for the first time by Linda Asher, are both written in a voice that is at once personal, vehement, and anguished. Here, Kundera appears already as one of our great European writers and truly our contemporary. Each piece is prefaced by a short presentation by French historian Pierre Nora and Czech-born French political scientist Jacques Rupnik.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/611687 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East

Author: Steven Simon

Narrator: Steven Simon, Robert Petkoff

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 16 hours 46 minutes

Release date: April 11, 2023

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

“A comprehensive, even magisterial review . . . This is strong stuff, but Simon does not flinch.” —Foreign Affairs A longtime American foreign policy insider’s penetrating and definitive reckoning with this country’s involvement in the Middle East The culmination of almost forty years at the highest levels of policymaking and scholarship, Grand Delusion is Steven Simon’s tour de force, offering a comprehensive and deeply informed account of U.S. engagement in the Middle East. Simon begins with the Reagan administration, when American perception of the region shifted from a cluster of faraway and frequently skirmishing nations to a shining, urgent opportunity for America to (in Reagan’s words) “serve the cause of world peace and the future of mankind.” Reagan fired the starting gun on decades of deepening American involvement, but as the global economy grew, bringing an increasing reliance on oil, U.S. diplomatic and military energies were ever more fatefully absorbed by the Middle East. Grand Delusion explores the motivations, strategies, and shortcomings of each presidential administration from Reagan to today, exposing a web of intertwined events—from the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict amid Israeli domestic politics, Cold War rivalries, and Saudi Arabia’s quest for security, to 9/11 and the war on terror—managed by a Washington policy process frequently ruled by wishful thinking and partisan politics. Simon’s sharp sense of irony and incisive writing brings complex history to life. He illuminates the motives behind America's commitment to Israel; explodes the popular narrative of Desert Storm as a “good war”; and calls out the devastating consequences of our mistakes, particularly for people of the region trapped by the onslaught of American military action and pitiless economic sanctions. Grand Delusion reveals that this story, while episodically impressive, has too often been tragic and at times dishonorable. As we enter a new era in foreign policy, this is an essential book, a cautionary history that illuminates American's propensity for self-deception and misadventure at a moment when the nation is redefining its engagement with a world in crisis.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/610790 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

Author: Quinn Slobodian

Narrator: Keith Sellon-Wright

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 0 minutes

Release date: April 4, 2023

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Brought to you by Penguin. Look at a map of the world and you'll see a neat patchwork of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. From the 1990s onwards, globalization has shattered the map, leading to an explosion of new legal entities: tax havens, free ports, city-states, gated enclaves and special economic zones. These new spaces are freed from ordinary forms of regulation, taxation and mutual obligation - and with them, ultracapitalists believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether. Historian Quinn Slobodian follows the most notorious radical libertarians - from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel - around the globe as they search for the perfect home for their free market fantasy. The hunt leads from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the medieval City of London, and finally into the world's oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where capitalism and democracy can be finally uncoupled. Crack-Up Capitalism is a propulsive history of the recent past, and an alarming view of our near future. ©2023 Quinn Slobodian (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/608892 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Plot to Save South Africa: The Week Mandela Averted Civil War and Forged a New Nation

Author: Justice Malala

Narrator: Justice Malala, Nick Boraine

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 35 minutes

Release date: April 4, 2023

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

‘Superbly reported, compelling . . . wonderfully captures the spirit of that time’ Financial Times 'Gripping and important' Observer Nine days that set the course of a nation... Johannesburg, Easter weekend, 1993. Nelson Mandela has been free for three years and is in slow-moving power-sharing talks with President FW de Klerk when a white supremacist shoots Mandela’s popular young heir apparent, Chris Hani, in the hope of igniting an all-out civil war. Will he succeed in plunging South Africa into chaos, safeguarding apartheid for perhaps years to come? Or can Mandela and de Klerk overcome their differences and mutual suspicion and calm their followers, plotting a way forward? In The Plot to Save South Africa, acclaimed South African journalist Justice Malala recounts the riveting story of the next nine days – never before told in full – revealing rarely seen sides of both Mandela and de Klerk, the fascinating behind-the-scenes debates within each of their parties over whether to pursue peace or war, and their increasingly desperate attempts to restrain their supporters despite mounting popular frustrations. Flitting between the points of view of over a dozen characters on all sides of the conflict, Justice Malala offers an illuminating look at successful leadership in action… and a terrifying reminder of just how close a country we think of today as a model for racial reconciliation came to civil war. ‘A dramatic work of history, prodigiously reported and beautifully crafted. Justice Malala is a first-rate storyteller, deftly weaving history with a narrative that reads like a novel. I couldn’t put it down’ Jonathan Eig, New York Times bestselling author of Ali: A Life ‘Magnificent, furious and unputdownable’ Andrew Harding, BBC Africa correspondent and author of These Are Not Gentle People

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/611850 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All

Author: Craig Shirley

Narrator: Tom Parks

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 18 hours 49 minutes

Release date: March 21, 2023

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Today's political scene looks nothing like it did thirty years ago, and that is due mostly to Reagan's monumental reshaping of the Republican party. What few people realize, however, is that Reagan's revolution did not begin when he took office in 1980, but in his failed presidential challenge to Gerald Ford in 1975-1976. This is the remarkable story of that historic campaign-one that, as Reagan put it, turned a party of 'pale pastels' into a national party of 'bold colors.' Featuring interviews with a myriad of politicos, journalists, insiders, and observers, Craig Shirley relays intriguing, never-before-told anecdotes about Reagan, his staff, the campaign, the media, and the national parties and shows how Reagan, instead of following the lead of the ever-weakening Republican party, brought the party to him and almost single-handedly revived it. Photos are included in the audiobook companion PDF download.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/605380 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Parents of the World, Unite!: How to Save Our Schools from the Left's Radical Agenda

Author: Ian Prior

Narrator: Chris Abell

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 5 hours 56 minutes

Release date: March 21, 2023

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

This essential playbook reveals the winning strategies for successfully fighting a radical woke agenda in your kids’ schools. Ian Prior is one of the most articulate and successful parent-activists in the United States. Armed with 12 inspiring battle-tested rules and revealing stories about sparring with self-righteous Woke neighbors (the “Chardonnay Antifa”), Ian shares secrets about what fellow parents can do in their own school districts to stop the Left's dark vision from taking root.   Get ready to laugh. This is not a boring education book. With real world lessons and funny anecdotes readers can connect with, Ian explains how families can win the battle to stop divisive and dangerous concepts rooted in critical race theory and other dangerous left-wing ideologies from spreading to their schools. He convincingly makes the case that the Left envisions a public education system in America where children are no longer the responsibility of their parents but rather mere wards of the state.   You’ll be shocked and amused by the outrageous stories in Ian’s suburban county that unexpectedly became ground zero for the parents’ rights movement. This sign-of-the times book helpfully explains the confusing and infuriating cultural moment we find ourselves in. Parents of the World, Unite! is an indispensable book for American families who believe they should be able to raise their children without government interference in their moral, religious, and ethical choices -- and are ready to join a revolution of parents.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/605378 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right

Author: Matthew Dallek

Narrator: Donald Corren

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 38 minutes

Release date: March 21, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

How a notorious far right organization set the Republican Party on a long march toward extremism   At the height of the John Birch Society’s activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. After all, “Birchers” believed that a vast communist conspiracy existed in America and posed an existential threat to Christianity, capitalism, and freedom. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society’s extremism remade American conservatism. Most Birchers were white professionals who were radicalized as growing calls for racial and gender equality appeared to upend American life. Conservative leaders recognized that these affluent voters were needed to win elections, and for decades the GOP courted Birchers and their extremist successors. The far right steadily gained power, finally toppling the Republican establishment and electing Donald Trump.   Birchers is a deeply researched and indispensable new account of the rise of extremism in the United States.