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

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/615919 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: 43: Inside the George W. Bush Presidency

Author: Barbara A. Perry, Russell L. Riley, Michael Nelson

Narrator: Tom Parks

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 13 hours 18 minutes

Release date: October 25, 2022

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

The presidency of George W. Bush has been the subject of extensive commentary but limited scholarly analysis in the years since he left office. 43 draws extensively, but not solely, from the recently released interviews of the Miller Center's Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia. This volume consists of ten chapters, written by some of today's most eminent presidency scholars, examining key topics and themes, including 9/11, the unitary executive, Supreme Court appointments, compassionate conservatism, Cheney's vice presidency, the Iraq War, and the financial crisis of 2008. The essays in this volume take seriously the complexities of a White House trying to respond to the most devastating attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, examining both the successes and failures of this administration in the first systemic effort to mine the confidential, candid oral history interviews recorded with senior officials from the Bush presidency. The essays are critical, yet balanced, in providing assessments of Bush's controversial victory in 2000; 'endless wars' precipitated by the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and legislative battles over taxes, education reform, Medicare, and attempts to address the Great Recession. These landmark events are illuminated by conversations with the decision-makers who made history.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/615843 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America

Author: Jordan E. Taylor

Narrator: Christopher P. Brown

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 27 minutes

Release date: October 25, 2022

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

In Misinformation Nation, Jordan E. Taylor reveals how foreign news defined the boundaries of early American politics and ultimately drove colonists to revolt against Britain and create a new nation. News was the lifeblood of early American politics, but newspaper printers had few reliable sources to report on events from abroad. Though frequently false, the information that Americans encountered in newspapers, letters, and conversations framed their sense of reality, leading them to respond with protests, boycotts, violence, and the creation of new political institutions. Fearing that their enemies were spreading fake news, American colonists fought for control of the news media. As their basic perceptions of reality diverged, Loyalists separated from Patriots and, in the new nation created by the revolution, Republicans inhabited a political reality quite distinct from that of their Federalist rivals. The American Revolution was not only a political contest for liberty, equality, and independence (for white men, at least); it was also a contest to define certain accounts of reality to be truthful while defining others as false and dangerous. Misinformation Nation argues that we must also conceive of the American Revolution as a series of misperceptions, misunderstandings, and uninformed overreactions.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/615278 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational

Author: Michael Shermer

Narrator: Michael Shermer

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 59 minutes

Release date: October 25, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 3

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Best-selling author Michael Shermer presents an overarching theory of conspiracy theories—who believes them and why, which ones are real, and what we should do about them.Nothing happens by accident, everything is connected, and there are no coincidences: that is the essence of conspiratorial thinking. Long a fringe part of the American political landscape, conspiracy theories are now mainstream: 147 members of Congress voted in favor of objections to the 2020 presidential election based on an unproven theory about a rigged electoral process promoted by the mysterious group QAnon. But this is only the latest example in a long history of ideas that include the satanic panics of the 1980s, the New World Order and Vatican conspiracy theories, fears about fluoridated water, speculations about President John F. Kennedy's assassination, and the notions that the Sandy Hook massacre was a false-flag operation and 9/11 was an inside job.In Conspiracy, Michael Shermer presents an overarching review of conspiracy theories—who believes them and why, which ones are real, and what we should do about them. Trust in conspiracy theories, he writes, cuts across gender, age, race, income, education level, occupational status—and even political affiliation. One reason that people believe these conspiracies, Shermer argues, is that enough of them are real that we should be constructively conspiratorial: elections have been rigged (LBJ's 1948 Senate race); medical professionals have intentionally harmed patients in their care (Tuskegee); your government does lie to you (Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Afghanistan); and, tragically, some adults do conspire to sexually abuse children. But Shermer reveals that other factors are also in play: anxiety and a sense of loss of control play a role in conspiratorial cognition patterns, as do certain personality traits.This engaging book will be an important read for anyone concerned about the future direction of American politics, as well as anyone who's watched friends or family fall into patterns of conspiratorial thinking.A supplemental PDF is included with this audiobook.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/617112 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court

Author: Jennifer Mueller, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

Narrator: Charles Constant

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 1 minute

Release date: October 18, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Following his book Captured on corporate capture of regulatory and government agencies, and his years of experience as a prosecutor, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse here turns his attention to the right-wing scheme to capture the courts, and how it influenced the Trump administration's appointment of over 230 'business-friendly' judges, including the last three justices of the United States Supreme Court. Whitehouse traces the motive to control the court system back to Lewis Powell's notorious memo, which gave a road map for corporate influence to target the judiciary, and chronicles a hidden-money campaign using an armada of front groups and helped by the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision. The scheme utilized the Federalist Society as an appointments turnstile, spent secret millions to support the nominees, orchestrated an 'amicus brief' signaling apparatus, and propped up front-group litigants to 'fast-lane' strategic test cases to the friendly justices. Whitehouse finds the same small handful of right-wing billionaires and corporations running operations that he likens to 'covert ops,' ultimately enticing the Senate to break rules, norms, and precedents to confirm wildly inappropriate nominees who would advance the anti-government agenda of a small number of corporate oligarchs.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/617018 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America

Author: Ira Shapiro

Narrator: Paul Bellantoni

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 25 minutes

Release date: October 18, 2022

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

In two previous highly regarded books on the US Senate, Ira Shapiro chronicled the institution from its apogee in the 1970s through its decline in the decades since. Now, Shapiro turns his gaze to how the Senate responded to the challenges posed by the Trump administration and its prospects under President Biden. The Founding Fathers gave the US Senate many functions, but it had one fundamental responsibility—its raison d'etre: to provide the check against a dangerous president who threatened our democracy. Two hundred and thirty years later, when Donald Trump, a potential authoritarian, finally reached the White House, the Senate should have served as both America's first and last lines of defense. Instead, we had the nightmare scenario: today's Senate, reduced through a long period of decline to a hyper-partisan, gridlocked shadow of its former self, was unable to meet its fundamental responsibility. Shapiro documents the pivotal challenges facing the Senate during the Trump administration, arguing that the body's failure to provide leadership represents the most catastrophic failure of government in American history. The last section covers the Senate's performance during President Biden's first year in office and looks forward to the 2022 Senate elections and beyond.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/623849 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Shameless: The Fight for Adoption Disclosure and the Search for My Son

Author: Marilyn Churley

Narrator: Ellen Davis

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 53 minutes

Release date: October 15, 2022

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

In the late 1960s, at the age of eighteen and living far from home amidst the thriving counterculture of Ottawa, Marilyn Churley got pregnant. Like thousands of other women of the time she kept the event a secret. Faced with few options, she gave the baby up for adoption. Over twenty years later, as the Ontario NDP government’s minister responsible for all birth, death, and adoption records, including those of her own child, Churley found herself in a surprising and powerful position – fully engaged in the long and difficult battle to reform adoption disclosure laws and find her son. Both a personal and political story, Shameless is a powerful memoir about a mother’s struggle with loss, love, secrets, and lies – and an adoption system shrouded in shame.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/615918 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China

Author: John Delury

Narrator: Lee Goettl

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 16 hours 12 minutes

Release date: October 15, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a remote Pacific island, the agent belonged to an obscure anti-communist group known as the Third Force based out of Hong Kong. The exfiltration would fail disastrously, and one of the Americans on the mission, a recent Yale graduate named John T. Downey, ended up a prisoner of Mao Zedong's government for the next twenty years. Unraveling the truth behind decades of Cold War intrigue, John Delury documents the damage that this hidden foreign policy did to American political life. The US government kept the public in the dark about decades of covert activity directed against China, while Downey languished in a Beijing prison and his mother lobbied desperately for his release. Mining little-known Chinese sources, Delury sheds new light on Mao's campaigns to eliminate counterrevolutionaries and how the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party used captive spies in diplomacy with the West. Agents of Subversion is an innovative work of transnational history, and it demonstrates both how the Chinese Communist regime used the fear of special agents to tighten its grip on society and why intellectuals in Cold War America presciently worried that subversion abroad could lead to repression at home.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/619176 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Understandable Economics: Because Understanding Our Economy Is Easier Than You Think and More Important Than You Know

Author: Howard Yaruss

Narrator: Howard Yaruss

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 29 minutes

Release date: October 11, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

In this entertaining and informative guide, author Howard Yaruss breaks down our economic system in a straightforward way, avoiding jargon, formulas, graphs, and other technical material so common in books on this subject. Instead, he creates a compelling and comprehensive picture of our economy using accessible analogies, real-world observations, and entertaining anecdotes. Understandable Economics will enable listeners to answer questions such as: Why is inequality soaring and what can we do about it?; Do tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs or just create more inequality?; Where does money come from, why does it have value, and who controls it?; What does the Fed do and how does it affect our lives?; Could alternative currencies like Bitcoin replace the dollar?; Is our national debt a threat?; Why do so many people believe free trade is good if it causes some people to lose jobs?; Why does the economy regularly turn down and how can we get it back on track?; and many more. Understandable Economics provides the context, tools, and foundational knowledge listeners need to thoroughly understand our economy, determine which policies would work best, and champion those policies effectively.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/617256 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961–2021

Author: Alan S. Blinder

Narrator: Todd Mclaren

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 15 hours 12 minutes

Release date: October 11, 2022

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

From the New York Times bestselling author, the fascinating story of US economic policy from Kennedy to COVID—filled with lessons for today In this book, Alan Blinder, one of the world's most influential economists and one of the field's best writers, draws on his deep firsthand experience to provide an authoritative account of sixty years of monetary and fiscal policy in the United States. Spanning twelve presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden, and eight Federal Reserve chairs, from William McChesney Martin to Jerome Powell, this is an insider's story of macroeconomic policy that hasn't been told before—one that is a pleasure to listen to, and as interesting as it is important. Focusing on the most significant developments and long-term changes, Blinder traces the highs and lows of monetary and fiscal policy, which have by turns cooperated and clashed through many recessions and several long booms over the past six decades. From the fiscal policy of Kennedy's New Frontier to Biden's responses to the pandemic, the book takes listeners through the stagflation of the 1970s, the conquest of inflation under Jimmy Carter and Paul Volcker, the rise of Reaganomics, and the bubbles of the 2000s before bringing the story up through recent events—including the financial crisis, the Great Recession, and monetary policy during COVID-19.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/617111 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America

Author: Jonathan D. Cohen

Narrator: Tom Lennon

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 11 minutes

Release date: October 11, 2022

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Every week, one in eight Americans place a bet on the dream of a life-changing lottery jackpot. Americans spend more on lottery tickets annually than on video streaming services, concert tickets, books, and movie tickets combined. The story of lotteries in the United States may seem straightforward: tickets are bought predominately by poor people driven by the wishful belief that they will overcome infinitesimal odds and secure lives of luxury. The reality is more complicated. For a Dollar and a Dream shows how, in an era of stagnant upward mobility, millions of Americans turned to the lottery as their only chance at achieving the American Dream. Gamblers were not the only ones who bet on betting. As voters revolted against higher taxes in the late twentieth century, states saw legalized gambling as a panacea, a way of generating revenue without cutting public services or raising taxes. Alongside stories of lottery winners and losers, Jonathan Cohen shows how gamblers have used prayer to help them win a jackpot, how states tried to pay for schools with scratch-off tickets, and how lottery advertising has targeted lower income and nonwhite communities. For a Dollar and a Dream charts the untold history of the nation's lottery system, revealing how players and policymakers alike got hooked on hopes for a gambling windfall.