Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/563326 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret

Author: Emily Van Duyn

Narrator: Sarah Welborn

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 30 minutes

Release date: February 15, 2022

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

In Democracy Lives in Darkness, Emily Van Duyn discovers and follows a secret political organization of progressive women in a conservative community in rural Texas. Its members met in secret to protect themselves from retaliation by their conservative neighbors, friends, and family. They discussed immigrant rights, women's reproductive rights, racism, and intolerance of those of different racial/ethnic and cultural backgrounds in their community. Democracy Lives in Darkness is about this group: their daily lives, their choices, and ultimately, their incubation. But it is also about what led them to meet in secret—the political prejudice and hostility that marginalizes and makes people afraid, and the growing political, social, and geographic cleavages that now make even mainstream dissent dangerous. Van Duyn asks why mainstream partisans feel the need to hide their political beliefs from others, why they feel afraid of those from the opposite party, how they stay politically engaged in secret, and how this can transform them and their communities. Van Duyn challenges the assumption that the United States is a liberal democracy where ideas can be expressed freely and publicly. Rather, she suggests that democracy in the United States may exist in darkness, but, more optimistically, that it uses this darkness to move forward.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/563318 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Just Checking Scores: TV Anchor Publicly Shamed by Husband’s Secret Sex Life

Author: Marisa Burke

Narrator: Nikki Zakocs

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 34 minutes

Release date: February 15, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 3 of Total 1

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Marisa Burke is a top-rated, local anchorwoman at one of the most respected local ABC affiliates in the country. She enjoys celebrity status, six-figure salaries, a gorgeous home, and beautiful family. But rather than reporting the news, Marisa suddenly becomes the subject of it when her husband, an admired educator, the father of her two young girls, and the man she truly believed was her loving soulmate, was arrested for unlawful sexual relationships with underage boys. What was even more excruciating, Marisa was forced to endure the shame and embarrassment of anchoring the same newscasts in which the personally gut-wrenching news stories about her husband's charges were reported. Marisa Burke's shocking memoir, Just Checking Scores reveals what happens when a person at the top is brought down by public humiliation into a world of deep despair and what Burke did to channel her suffering and anguish into defiance and strength.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/563278 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments

Author: Jennifer Forestal

Narrator: Holly Adams

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 20 minutes

Release date: February 15, 2022

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

How should we 'fix' digital technologies to support democracy instead of undermining it? In Designing for Democracy, Jennifer Forestal argues that accurately evaluating the democratic potential of digital spaces means studying how the built environment—a primary component of our 'modern public square'—structures our activity, shapes our attitudes, and supports the kinds of relationships and behaviors democracy requires. While many scholars and practitioners are attentive to the role of design in shaping behavior, they have yet to fully engage with the question of what structures are required to support democratic communities—and how to build them. Forestal closes this gap by providing a new theory of democratic space. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, she argues that 'democratic spaces' must be designed with three environmental characteristics—boundaries, durability, and flexibility—that, taken together, afford users the ability to engage in fundamental civic practices. Through extended analyses of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, Forestal shows precisely how well these digital platforms meet the criteria for democratic spaces, or whether they do so at all. The result is a nuanced analysis of the democratic communities that form—or fail to emerge—in these spaces, as well as more concrete suggestions for how to improve them.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/553361 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding

Author: Ryan S. Walters

Narrator: Mark Bramhall

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 50 minutes

Release date: February 15, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 3

Ratings of Narrator: 4.5 of Total 2

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

He's the butt of political jokes, frequently subjected to ridicule, and almost never absent a 'Worst Presidents' list where he most often ends up at the bottom. Historians have labeled him the 'Worst President Ever,' 'Dead Last,' 'Unfit,' and 'Incompetent,' to name but a few. Many contemporaries were equally cruel. H. L. Mencken called him a 'nitwit.' To Alice Roosevelt Longworth, he was a 'slob.' Such is the current reputation of our 29th President, Warren Gamaliel Harding. In an interesting survey in 1982, which divided the scholarly respondents into 'conservative' and 'liberal' categories, both groups picked Harding as the worst President. But historian Ryan Walters shows that Harding, a humble man from Marion, Ohio, has been unfairly remembered. He quickly fixed an economy in depression and started the boom of the Roaring Twenties, healed a nation in the throes of social disruption, and reversed America’s interventionist foreign policy.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/550672 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Western Jihadism

Author: Jytte Klausen

Narrator: Rosemary Benson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 23 hours 20 minutes

Release date: February 15, 2022

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

In forensic and compelling detail, Jytte Klausen traces how Islamist revolutionaries exiled in Europe and North America in the 1990s helped create and control one of the world's most impactful terrorist movements—and how, after the near-obliteration of the organization during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, they helped build it again. She shows how the diffusion of Islamist terrorism to Europe and North America has been driven, not by local grievances of Western Muslims, but by the strategic priorities of the international Salafi-jihadist revolutionary movement. The jihadists—Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and their many affiliates and associates—also proved to be amazingly resilient. Again and again, the movement recovered from major setbacks. Appealing to disaffected Muslims of immigrant origin and alienated converts to Islam, jihadist groups continue to recruit new adherents in Europe and North America, street-side in neighborhoods, in jails, and online through increasingly clandestine platforms. Taking a comparative and historical approach, deploying cutting-edge analytical tools, and drawing on her unparalleled database of up to 6,500 Western jihadist extremists and their networks, Klausen has produced the most comprehensive account yet of the origins of Western jihadism and its role in the global movement.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/558857 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD: How Massive Attacks of Disruption Became the Looming Existential Danger to a Divided Nation and the World at Large

Author: Harlan Ullman

Narrator: Daniel Thomas May

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 0 minutes

Release date: February 14, 2022

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Beyond traditional threats from states such as China and Russia and non-state actors employing violent extremism, can America's politics and political system withstand the assaults of the Fifth Horseman and the new MAD, Massive Attacks of Disruption? The Covid-19 pandemic, the January 6 insurrection and takeover of the US Capitol, SolarWinds cyber attacks, the Texas storms that cut power, and the blocking of the Suez Canal are harbingers of the new MAD. And the nation is unaware and unprepared to deal with them. What must be done? First, we must recognize the potentially existential dangers posed by MAD. Second, we must reorganize government to meet these dangers. Third, we need new national security strategies to protect, defend, and mitigate these new threats. Fourth, we must create a private-public partnership in a national re-investment fund that can redress many of the risks of MAD. In this transformative, provocative, and highly innovative book, Dr. Harlan Ullman issues a dramatic warning about so far unrecognized existential dangers to the nation and offers a plan of action America must take if the Fifth Horseman and the new MAD are to be tamed or broken.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/556115 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

Author: Priya Parker

Narrator: Bernadette Dunne

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 21 minutes

Release date: February 10, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Brought to you by Penguin. How to create the most transformative meetings and moments Being deprived of gathering has revealed just how important it is to us; to connect with others, collaborate, share ideas and create moving, life-affirming experiences. At a time when coming together is more crucial than ever, Priya Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that can help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences in their lives, large and small, for work and for play. Drawing on her wide expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn't, and why. She investigates a wide array of gatherings - a court hearing, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp - and explains how simple changes can invigorate any group experience. The result is a book full of exciting ideas of real-world applications and one that will forever alter the way you look at your next business meeting, dinner party and garden barbecue. 'Priya Parker has created both an art and a science to gathering in ways that can bring joy and fulfilment to any meeting' Deepak Chopra 'Hosts of all kinds, this is a must-read!' Chris Anderson, creator of TED 'A long overdue and urgent manifesto' Seth Godin, New York Times bestselling author of This is Marketing © Priya Parker 2018 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/563279 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: China's Foreign Policy Contradictions: Lessons from China's R2P, Hong Kong, and WTO Policy

Author: Tim Nicholas Ruhlig

Narrator: Jamie Renell

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 1 minute

Release date: February 8, 2022

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Throughout the post–Mao reform era, China has championed the principle of sovereign state control, which holds that states should not intervene in the affairs of other states. Yet as Tim Nicholas Rühlig argues in China's Foreign Policy Contradictions, in recent years they have not actually acted this way. Chinese foreign policy actions fail to match up with official rhetoric, and these inconsistencies—in combination with China's growing power—will have dramatic effects on the future shape of international order. To explain these contradictions, Rühlig draws from in-depth interviews with party-state officials to explain the foreign policy dynamics and processes of the normally opaque Chinese party-state. He demonstrates how different sources of the Chinese Communist Party's domestic legitimacy compete within the complex and highly fragmented Chinese party-state, resulting in contradictory foreign policies. He focuses on three issue areas: international human rights law and 'responsibility to protect' (R2P); China's role in World Trade Organization (WTO) policymaking; and China's evolving relationship with Hong Kong. In this work, Rühlig shows not only why China's foreign policy is so inconsistent, but why it is likely to contribute to a more particularistic, plural, and fragmented international order in the years to come.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/557897 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why It Matters

Author: Megan Walsh

Narrator: Nancy Wu

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 3 hours 31 minutes

Release date: February 8, 2022

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

What does contemporary China's diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you’ve never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by “rotten girls,” swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden age of Chinese science fiction. Chinese online fiction is now the largest publishing platform in the world. Fueled by her passionate engagement with Chinese literature and culture, Megan Walsh, a brilliant young critic, shows us why it’s important to finally pay attention to Chinese fiction—an exuberant drama that illustrates the complex relationship between art and politics, one that is increasingly shaping the West as well. Turns out, writers write neither what their government nor foreign readers want or expect, and they work on a different wavelength to keep alive ideas and events that are either overlooked or off limits. The Subplot vividly captures the ways in which literature offers an alternative—perhaps truer—understanding of the contradictions that make up China itself.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/548843 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Sledgehammer: How Breaking with the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East

Author: David Friedman

Narrator: Jim Seybert

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 20 minutes

Release date: February 8, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 2

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

The Trump administration’s peace agreements in the Middle East were the greatest foreign policy accomplishment in decades. Now, for the first time, his ambassador to Israel explains how they pulled it off. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity. For decades, the U.S. State Department called it diplomacy. David Friedman was an outside candidate when President Trump appointed him U.S. ambassador to Israel. He took office to find U.S.-Israel policy stuck in stalemate. For years, accepted wisdom was that extensive experience and detailed knowledge of Middle Eastern history and culture were necessary to negotiate treaties. In truth, Friedman realized, all parties played on that accepted wisdom to stall—expecting to get a better deal further down the road. Tossing the State Department playbook aside and incorporating insights from his many years as a negotiator in the American private sector, Friedman and a small team with no prior diplomatic experience revamped American diplomacy to project “peace through strength.” He emphasized the importance of leverage, the key to any good negotiation. After painstaking, behind-the-scenes work, the Abraham Accords were signed: a historic series of peace deals between Israel and the five Muslim nations. In Sledgehammer, Friedman tells the true story of how the Abraham Accords came about. He takes us from the Oval Office to the highest echelons of power in the Middle East, putting us at the table during the intense negotiations that led to this historic breakthrough. The inside story of arguably the greatest achievement of the Trump Administration, Sledgehammer is an important, inspiring account of the hard, hopeful work necessary to bring long overdue—and lasting—peace to one of the most turbulent and tragic regions of the globe.