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

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/345682 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power Author: An Xiao Mina Narrator: Erin Bennett Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 57 minutes Release date: January 8, 2019 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: A global exploration of internet memes as agents of pop culture, politics, protest, and propaganda on- and offline, and how they will save or destroy us all. Memes are the street art of the social web. Using social media–driven movements as her guide, technologist and digital media scholar An Xiao Mina unpacks the mechanics of memes and how they operate to reinforce, amplify, and shape today’s politics. She finds that the “silly” stuff of meme culture—the photo remixes, the selfies, the YouTube songs, and the pun-tastic hashtags—are fundamentally intertwined with how we find and affirm one another, direct attention to human rights and social justice issues, build narratives, and make culture. Mina finds parallels, for example, between a photo of Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, raising their hands in a gesture of resistance and one from eight thousand miles away, in Hong Kong, of Umbrella Movement activists raising yellow umbrellas as they fight for voting rights. She shows how a viral video of then presidential nominee Donald Trump laid the groundwork for pink pussyhats, a meme come to life as the widely recognized symbol for the international Women’s March. Crucially, Mina reveals how, in parts of the world where public dissent is downright dangerous, memes can belie contentious political opinions that would incur drastic consequences if expressed outright. Activists in China evade censorship by critiquing their government with grass mud horse pictures online. Meanwhile, governments and hate groups are also beginning to utilize memes to spread propaganda, xenophobia, and misinformation. Botnets and state-sponsored agents spread them to confuse and distract internet communities. On the long, winding road from innocuous cat photos, internet memes have become a central practice for political contention and civic engagement. Memes to Movements unveils the transformative power of memes, for better and for worse. At a time when our movements are growing more complex and open-ended—when governments are learning to wield the internet as effectively as protestors—Mina brings a fresh and sharply innovative take to the media discourse.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/345375 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties Author: Paul Collier Narrator: Peter Noble Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 27 minutes Release date: December 4, 2018 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.52 of Total 23 Ratings of Narrator: 4.5 of Total 4 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it. Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of the United States and other Western societies: thriving cities versus rural counties, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now. In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts—economic, social and cultural—with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervor of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession. Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world’s most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself—and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the twentieth century.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/345677 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing Author: Rick Lowery, William J. Barber, Liz Theoharis Narrator: Jd Jackson, Erin Bennett Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 31 minutes Release date: December 4, 2018 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: A collection of sermons and speeches that lay out a groundbreaking vision for intersectional organizing, paired with inspirational and practical essays from activists in today’s Poor People’s Campaign The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II has been called “the closest person we have to Martin Luther King Jr. in our midst” (Cornel West) and “one of the most gifted organizers and orators in the country today” (Ari Berman). In this age of political division and civic unrest, Rev. Barber’s message is more necessary than ever. This volume features Rev. Barber’s most stirring sermons and speeches, with response essays by prominent public intellectuals, activists, and faith leaders. Drawing from the history of social movements in the US, especially the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, Rev. Barber and the contributors to this volume speak to the most pressing issues of our time, including Black Lives Matter, the fight for a $15 minimum wage, the struggle to protect voting rights, the march for women’s rights, and the movement to overcome poverty and unite the dispossessed across all dividing lines. Grounded in the fundamental biblical theme of poor and oppressed people taking action together, the book suggests ways to effectively build a fusion movement to make America fair and just for everyone.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/346556 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Defending Free Speech: Selected Commentary by the Ayn Rand Institute Author: Elan Journo, Onkar Ghate, Steve Simpson, Leonard Peikoff Narrator: Chris Abell Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 3 hours 53 minutes Release date: December 4, 2018 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: Freedom of speech is indispensable to a free and civilized society, yet this precious right is increasingly under attack today. Islamic totalitarians repeatedly threaten and kill those deemed blasphemers while our political leaders stand idly by—and many intellectuals blame the victims. College students seek “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” from controversial ideas. The government harasses tea party groups, preventing them from speaking out during an election, and it investigates oil companies and advocacy groups for the “crime” of dissenting from climate change orthodoxy. Why is this happening? What can be done? This hard-hitting collection provides answers. Applying Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism to the most pressing free speech issues of the day, the essays in this book reveal the attacks on free speech to be the product of destructive ideas—ideas that are eroding Western culture at its foundation. They expose those ideas and the individuals who hold them, and, importantly, they identify the only ideas on which Western civilization can be sustained: reason, egoism, and individual rights.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/345712 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World Author: Michael Ignatieff Narrator: Michael Ignatieff Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 40 minutes Release date: November 20, 2018 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: What moral values do human beings hold in common? As globalization draws us together economically, are our values converging or diverging? In particular, are human rights becoming a global ethic? These were the questions that led Michael Ignatieff to embark on a three-year, eight-nation journey in search of answers. The Ordinary Virtues presents Ignatieff’s discoveries and his interpretation of what globalization―and resistance to it―is doing to our conscience and our moral understanding. Through dialogues with favela dwellers in Brazil, South Africans and Zimbabweans living in shacks, Japanese farmers, gang leaders in Los Angeles, and monks in Myanmar, Ignatieff found that while human rights may be the language of states and liberal elites, the moral language that resonates with most people is that of everyday virtues: tolerance, forgiveness, trust, and resilience. These ordinary virtues are the moral operating system in global cities and obscure shantytowns alike, the glue that makes the multicultural experiment work. Ignatieff seeks to understand the moral structure and psychology of these core values, which privilege the local over the universal, and citizens’ claims over those of strangers. Ordinary virtues, he concludes, are antitheoretical and anti-ideological. They can be cheerfully inconsistent. When order breaks down and conflicts break out, they are easily exploited for a politics of fear and exclusion―reserved for one’s own group and denied to others. But they are also the key to healing, reconciliation, and solidarity on both a local and a global scale.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/344621 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Blood of the Liberals Author: George Packer Narrator: George Packer Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 17 hours 12 minutes Release date: November 6, 2018 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family's politically active history George Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century--an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely--and ultimately fatally--tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, this is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/343346 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War Author: Andrew Delbanco Narrator: Ari Fliakos Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 40 minutes Release date: November 6, 2018 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: “Excellent . . . stunning.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates The devastating story of how fugitive slaves drove the nation to Civil War A New York Times Notable Book Selection * Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize* Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award * A New York Times Critics' Best Book  For decades after its founding, America was really two nations—one slave, one free. There were many reasons why this composite nation ultimately broke apart, but the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the 'united' states was actually a lie. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation based on the principle of human equality was in fact a prison-house in which millions of Americans had no rights at all. By awakening northerners to the true nature of slavery, and by enraging southerners who demanded the return of their human 'property,' fugitive slaves forced the nation to confront the truth about itself. By 1850, with America on the verge of collapse, Congress reached what it hoped was a solution—the notorious Compromise of 1850, which required that fugitive slaves be returned to their masters. Like so many political compromises before and since, it was a deal by which white Americans tried to advance their interests at the expense of black Americans. Yet the Fugitive Slave Act, intended to preserve the Union, in fact set the nation on the path to civil war. It divided not only the American nation, but also the hearts and minds of Americans who struggled with the timeless problem of when to submit to an unjust law and when to resist. The fugitive slave story illuminates what brought us to war with ourselves and the terrible legacies of slavery that are with us still.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/344635 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Children Author: David Halberstam Narrator: Bahni Turpin Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 32 hours 10 minutes Release date: November 6, 2018 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: The Children is David Halberstam's brilliant and moving evocation of the early days of the civil rights movement, as seen through the story of the young people--the Children--who met in the 1960s and went on to lead the revolution.  Magisterial in scope, with a strong you-are-there quality, The Children is a story one of America's preeminent journalists has waited years to write, a powerful book about one of the most dramatic movements in American history. They came together as part of Reverend James Lawson's workshops on nonviolence, eight idealistic black students whose families had sacrificed much so that they could go to college.  And they risked it all, and their lives besides, when they joined the growing civil rights movement.  David Halberstam shows how Martin Luther King, Jr. recruited Lawson to come to Nashville to train students in Gandhian techniques of nonviolence.  We see the strength of the families the Children came from, moving portraits of several generations of the black experience in America.  We feel Diane Nash's fear before the first  sit-in to protest segregation of Nashville lunch counters, and then we see how Diane Nash and others--John Lewis, Gloria Johnson, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, Curtis Murphy, James Bevel, Rodney Powell--persevered until they ultimately accomplished that goal.  After the sit-ins, when the Freedom Rides to desegregate interstate buses were in danger of being stopped because of violence, it was these same young people who led the bitter battle into the Deep South.  Halberstam takes us into those buses, lets us witness the violence the students encountered in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma.  And he shows what has happened to the Children since the 1960s, as they have gone on with their lives. The Children bears the trademark qualities that have made David Halberstam one of the leading nonfiction writers of our era.  The Children is his most personal book since The Best and the Brightest, a magnificent re-creation of a unique period in America, and of the lives of the ordinary people whose courage and vision changed history.two

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/344926 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Work Like a Woman: A Manifesto For Change Author: Mary Portas Narrator: Mary Portas Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 12 minutes Release date: November 1, 2018 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: Random House presents the audiobook edition of Work Like a Woman written and read by Mary Portas. By most people’s standards I would say I’ve had a pretty good career. I’ve reached the top of the ‘ladder’ and been lucky enough to have had a damned good life. But at what cost? At the cost of who I truly was. I played the business game for years, where the rules were set by men for men. I was tough and aggressive. I put in long hours, was competitive and resilient. But I suppressed my natural energy, sensitivity and instinct. I worked like this until I couldn’t any more. And then I changed. My team and I rebuilt my business on the values that matter: collaboration, empathy, instinct and trust. Values not always associated with leadership or winning, but which have made every one of us feel good. Now I want to share what I’ve learned through my own experiences, and am still learning, to change the way you work so that female energy and power will be seen as the most valuable currency in today’s new world of work. It’s time to create an unstoppable force for change. A feminine force. It’s time to #WorkLikeAWoman.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/344892 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy Author: Mariana Mazzucato Narrator: Amy Finegan Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 34 minutes Release date: November 1, 2018 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato, read by Amy Finegan. Who really creates wealth in our world? And how do we decide the value of what they do? At the heart of today's financial and economic crisis is a problem hiding in plain sight. In modern capitalism, value-extraction is rewarded more highly than value-creation: the productive process that drives a healthy economy and society. From companies driven solely to maximize shareholder value to astronomically high prices of medicines justified through big pharma's 'value pricing', we misidentify taking with making, and have lost sight of what value really means. Once a central plank of economic thought, this concept of value - what it is, why it matters to us - is simply no longer discussed. Yet, argues Mariana Mazzucato in this penetrating and passionate new book, if we are to reform capitalism - radically to transform an increasingly sick system rather than continue feeding it - we urgently need to rethink where wealth comes from. Which activities create it, which extract it, which destroy it? Answers to these questions are key if we want to replace the current parasitic system with a type of capitalism that is more sustainable, more symbiotic - that works for us all. The Value of Everything will reignite a long-needed debate about the kind of world we really want to live in.