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

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/617445 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Pandora's Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk Author: Alison Young Narrator: Pamela Almand Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 46 minutes Release date: April 25, 2023 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: This fearless, deeply reported book about laboratory accidents asks the haunting question some elite scientists don’t want the public to entertain: Did the COVID-19 pandemic start with a lab leak in Wuhan, China?   This is an obvious question. Yet there’s been an extraordinary effort by government officials in China, as well as leading scientific experts in the United States and around the world, to shut down any investigation or discussion of the lab leak theory. In private, however, some of the world’s elite scientists have seen a lab accident as a very real and horrifying possibility. They know what the public doesn’t. Lab accidents happen with shocking frequency. Even at the world’s best-run labs. That’s among the revelations from Alison Young, the award-winning investigative reporter who has spent nearly 15 years uncovering shocking safety breaches at prestigious U.S. laboratories for USA Today and other respected news outlets.   In Pandora’s Gamble, Young goes deep into the troubling history -- and enormous risks -- of leaks and accidents at scientific labs. She takes readers on a riveting journey around the world to some of the worst lab mishaps in history, including the largely unknown stories of the lab workers at the U.S. Army’s Camp Detrick who suffered devastating infections at alarming rates during World War II. And her groundbreaking reporting exposes for the first time disturbing new details about recent accidents at prestigious laboratories – and the alarming gaps in government oversight that put all of us at risk.    Sourced through meticulous reporting and exclusive interviews with key players including Dr. Anthony Fauci, former CDC Director Tom Frieden and others, Young’s examination reveals that the only thing rare about lab accidents is the public rarely finds out about them. Because when accidents happen, powerful people and institutions often work hard to keep the information secret.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/617689 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Secret Gate: A True Story of Courage and Sacrifice During the Collapse of Afghanistan Author: Mitchell Zuckoff Narrator: Sean Pratt Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 43 minutes Release date: April 25, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: The incredible true story of a breathtaking rescue in the frenzied final hours of the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan—and how a brave Afghan mother and a compassionate American officer engineered a daring escape—from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 13 Hours “Reads like a thriller . . . The Secret Gate is a fast-paced escape narrative, but it is also a morally complex interrogation.”—The Washington Post (Best Books of the Year) When the U.S. began its withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Afghan Army instantly collapsed, Homeira Qaderi was marked for death at the hands of the Taliban. A celebrated author, academic, and champion for women's liberation, Homeira had achieved celebrity in her home country by winning custody of her son in a contentious divorce, a rarity in Afghanistan's patriarchal society. As evacuation planes departed above, Homeira was caught in the turmoil at the Kabul Airport, trying and failing to secure escape for her and her eight-year-old son, Siawash, along with her parents and the rest of their family.  Meanwhile, a young American diplomat named Sam Aronson was enjoying a brief vacation between assignments when chaos descended upon Afghanistan. Sam immediately volunteered to join the skeleton team of remaining officials at Kabul Airport, frantically racing to help rescue the more than 100,000 stranded Americans and their Afghan helpers. When Sam learned that the CIA had established a secret entrance into the airport two miles away from the desperate crowds crushing toward the gates, he started bringing families directly through, personally rescuing as many as fifty-two people in a single day.  On the last day of the evacuation, Sam was contacted by Homeira's literary agent, who persuaded him to help her escape. He needed to risk his life to get them through the gate in the final hours before it closed forever. He borrowed night-vision goggles and enlisted a Dari-speaking colleague and two heavily armed security contract “shooters.” He contacted Homeira with a burner phone, and they used a flashlight code signal borrowed from boyhood summer camp. For her part, Homeira broke Sam’s rules and withstood his profanities. Together they braved gunfire by Afghan Army soldiers anxious about the restive crowds outside the airport. Ultimately, to enter the airport, Homeira and Siawash would have to leave behind their family and everything they had ever known.  The Secret Gate tells the thrilling, emotional tale of a young man's courage and a mother and son’s skin-of-the-teeth escape from a homeland that is no longer their own.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/622444 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency Author: Chris Cillizza Narrator: Chris Cillizza Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 27 minutes Release date: April 18, 2023 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: A colorful look at how modern presidents play sports, have used sports to play politics, and what our fan-in-chief can often tell us about our national pastimes. POWER PLAYERS tells all the great stories of presidents and the sports they played, loved and spectated as a way to better understand what it takes to be elected to lead a country driven by sports fans of all stripes. While every modern president has used sports to relate to Joe Q. Public, POWER PLAYERS turns the lens around to examine how sports have shaped our presidents and made for some amazing moments in White House history, including: - Dwight Eisenhower played so much golf he had a putting green built outside the Oval Office! (He also almost died on a golf course while in office.) - How John F. Kennedy’s touch-football games with family were knowing plays to polish the Camelot mystique. - People might not have related to the aloof and awkward Richard Nixon but, hey, he would bowl a few frames just like them. - Ronald Reagan didn’t just play the part of “The Gipper” for the silver screen, but truly adopted the famous footballer’s never-say-die persona. - George H.W. Bush once ran a horseshoe league from the White House – with a commissioner and brackets! (He would later claim to have come up with the fan expression, “You da man.”) - Bill Clinton’s Arkansas Razorback fandom was so intense that he could be found shouting at the referees from a box at the basketball national championship game in 1994.  - George W. Bush’s not only owned the Texas Rangers but also threw out the most iconic first pitch ever in the 2001 World Series.  - What really went down when Barack Obama played pickup hoops with the North Carolina Tarheels. (He later won the state by .3 percent of the vote.) - Donald Trump is the only president ever featured in a professional wrestling storyline—and everything real and fake that went with that. In the pages of POWER PLAYERS, a love of sports shines through as the key to understanding who these presidents really were and how they chose to play by the rules, occasionally bluff or cheat, all the while coaching the country into a few quality wins and some notorious losses.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/615113 to listen full audiobooks. Title: An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford Author: Richard Norton Smith Narrator: Fred Sanders Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 36 hours 8 minutes Release date: April 11, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: “Gerald Ford is probably remembered more for how he got to the presidency than for what he did there. In this brilliant book, Richard Norton Smith tells the rest of the story. On every other page I found something I didn’t know, bringing new and important insights into how Ford kept the nation together and moved it past its most severe political crisis since the Civil War. It will become the definitive work on Ford and his presidency.'' -- Bob Schieffer, CBS News From the preeminent presidential scholar and acclaimed biographer of historical figures including George Washington, Herbert Hoover, and Nelson Rockefeller comes this eye-opening life of Gerald R. Ford, whose presidency arguably set the course for post-liberal America and a post-Cold War world. For many Americans, President Gerald Ford was the genial accident of history who controversially pardoned his Watergate-tarnished predecessor, presided over the fall of Saigon, and became a punching bag on Saturday Night Live. Yet as Richard Norton Smith reveals in a book full of surprises, Ford was an underrated leader whose tough decisions and personal decency look better with the passage of time. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Smith recreates Ford’s hardscrabble childhood in Michigan, his early anti-establishment politics and lifelong love affair with the former Betty Bloomer, whose impact on American culture he predicted would outrank his own. As president, Ford guided the nation through its worst Constitutional crisis since the Civil War and broke the back of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression—accomplishing both with little fanfare or credit (at least until 2001 when the JFK Library gave him its prestigious Profile in Courage Award in belated recognition of the Nixon pardon). Less coda than curtain raiser, Ford's administration bridged the Republican pragmatism of Eisenhower and Nixon and the more doctrinaire conservatism of Ronald Reagan. His introduction of economic deregulation would transform the American economy, while his embrace of the Helsinki Accords hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. This definitive biography, a decade in the making, will change history’s views of a man whose warning about presidential arrogance (“God help the country”) is more relevant than ever.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/618167 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences Author: Joan Biskupic Narrator: Kirsten Potter Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 11 minutes Release date: April 4, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 2 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: New York Times Editor's Choice ''Biskupic, an accomplished and well-sourced journalist, knows the court as well as anyone now covering it... In her new book Biskupic has done something different and a good deal harder. She has written a group narrative that combines close accounts of the court's public business in the Trump years with a history of its private dramas and conflicts... The deeper message of 'Nine Black Robes' is that even with a new president in office we remain captive to the Age of Trump... A quiet urgency ripples through this informative, briskly paced and gracefully written book.'' —New York Times Book Review ''Biskupic opens a window onto the opaque, insular world of the justices to show an institution sinking gradually into crisis . . . Biskupic is a longtime chronicler of the court, and ''Nine Black Robes'' puts on display her connections within its chambers.'' —Washington Post ''[Biskupic] knows how to make news and illuminate the personalities atop the judicial org chart . . . The book reveals unseen sausage-making . . .'' —Wall Street Journal ''Fascinating and informative . . . [Biskupic's] long experience covering the court . . . has put her in an incomparable position to comment on its make-up, historical positions and direction. It has also made her privy to many significant, little-known secrets about Supreme Court personalities and their historical behaviors.'' —The National Book Review CNN Senior Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic provides an urgent and inside look at the history-making era in the Supreme Court during the Trump and post-Trump years, from its seismic shift to the Right to its controversial decisions, including its reversal of Roe v. Wade, based on access to all the key players. Nine Black Robes displays the inner maneuverings among the Supreme Court justices that led to the seismic reversal of Roe v. Wade and a half century of women’s abortion rights. Biskupic details how rights are stripped away or, alternatively as in the case of gun owners, how rights are expanded. Today’s bench—with its conservative majority—is desperately ideological. The Court has been headed rightward and ensnared by its own intrigues for years, but the Trump appointments hastened the modern transformation. With unparalleled access to key players, Biskupic shows the tactics of each justice and reveals switched votes and internal pacts that typically never make the light of day, yet will have repercussions for generations to come. Nine Black Robes is the definitive narrative of the country’s highest court and its profound impact on all Americans.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/619344 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: Nick Boraine, Justice Malala Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 35 minutes Release date: April 4, 2023 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: A “gripping and important” (The Guardian) account of nine tumultuous days, as the assassination of Nelson Mandela’s protégé by a white supremacist threatens to derail South Africa’s democratic transition and plunge the nation into civil war. Johannesburg, Easter weekend, 1993. Nelson Mandela had been released after twenty-seven years in prison and was in power sharing talks with President F.W. de Klerk. After decades of resistance, the apartheid regime seemed poised to fall…until a white supremacist shot and killed Mandela’s popular heir apparent, Chris Hani, in a last desperate attempt to provoke civil war. Twenty-two-year-old rookie journalist Justice Malala was one of the first people at the crime scene. And as he covered the growing chaos of the next nine days—the protests and police brutality, reprisal killings and calls for paramilitary units to get combat-ready—he was terrified the assassin’s plot might succeed. In The Plot to Save South Africa, Malala “masterfully” (Foreign Affairs) unspools this political history in the style of a thriller, alternating between the perspectives of participants across the political spectrum in a riveting, kaleidoscopic account of a country on the brink. Through vivid archival research and shocking original interviews, he digs into questions that were never fully answered in all the tumult at the time: How involved were far-right elements within the South African government in inciting—or even planning—the assassination? And as the time bomb ticked on, how did these political rivals work together with opponents whose ideology they’d long abhorred—despite provocation and their own failures, doubts, and fears—to keep their country from descending into civil war?

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/615070 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Why Politics Fails: The Five Traps of the Modern World & How to Escape Them Author: Ben Ansell Narrator: Ben Ansell Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 32 minutes Release date: March 30, 2023 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. Why do the revolving doors of power always leave us disappointed? In Why Politics Fails, award-winning Oxford professor Ben Ansell shows that it's not the politicians that are the problem, it's that our collective goals result in five political 'traps'. Democracy: we all want a say in how we're governed, but it's impossible to have any true 'will of the people'. Equality: we want to be treated equally, but equal rights and equal outcomes undermine each other. Solidarity: we want a safety net when times are tough, but often we care about solidarity only when we need it ourselves. Security: we want protecting from harm, but not if it undermines our freedoms. Prosperity: we want to be richer tomorrow, but what makes us richer in the short run makes us poorer over the long haul. You've probably noticed a pattern here, which is that our self-interest undermines our ability to deliver on our collective goals. And these traps reinforce one another, so a polarized democracy can worsen inequality; a threadbare social safety net can worsen crime; runaway climate change will threaten global peace. Drawing on examples from Ancient Greece through Brexit and using his own counterintuitive and pathbreaking research - on why democracy thrives under high inequality, and how increased political and social equality can lead to greater class inequality - Ansell vividly illustrates how we can escape the political traps of our imperfect world. He shows that politics won't end, but that it doesn't have to fail.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/620638 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock Author: Jenny Odell Narrator: Kristen Sieh Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 28 minutes Release date: March 23, 2023 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. A radical argument that we are living on the wrong clock, one that tells us time is money, and that embracing a new concept of time can open us up to bold, hopeful possibilities from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing. Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time--that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible. In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries--physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives--or the life of the planet--is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, 'saving' time-recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature-could also mean that time saves us. ©2023 Jenny Odell (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/617021 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia's Post-Soviet Political System Author: Dmitrii Furman Narrator: Rich Miller Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 9 minutes Release date: March 7, 2023 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin implemented a political system of 'imitation democracy,' marked by 'a huge disparity between formal constitutional principles and the reality of authoritarian rule.' How did this system take shape, how else might it have developed, and what are the prospects for re-envisioning it more democratically in the future? These questions animate Dmitrii Furman's Imitation Democracy, a welcome antidote to books that blandly decry Putin as an omnipotent dictator, without considering his platforms, constituencies, and sources of power. With extensive public opinion polling drawn from throughout the late- and post-Soviet period, Furman offers a definitive account of the formation of the modern Russian political system, casting it into powerful relief through comparisons with other post-Soviet states. Peopled with grey technocrats, warring oligarchs, patriots, and provocateurs, Furman's narrative details the struggles among partisan factions, and the waves of public sentiment, that shaped modern Russia's political landscape, culminating in Putin's third presidential term, which resolves the contradiction between the 'form' and 'content' of imitation democracy, 'the formal dependence of power on elections and the actual dependence of elections on power.'

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/618773 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies Author: Mariana Mazzucato, Rosie Collington Narrator: Amy Finegan Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 55 minutes Release date: March 7, 2023 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: A vital and timely investigation into the opaque and powerful consulting industry—and what to do about it There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today that must change. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies’ reliance on companies such as McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability, and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown. The “Big Con” describes the confidence trick the consulting industry performs in contracts with hollowed-out and risk-averse governments and shareholder value-maximizing firms. It grew from the 1980s and 1990s in the wake of reforms by the neoliberal right and Third Way progressives, and it thrives on the ills of modern capitalism, from financialization and privatization to the climate crisis. It is possible because of the unique power that big consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks—as advisors, legitimators, and outsourcers—and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity. In the end, the Big Con weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments, and warps our economies. In The Big Con, Mazzucato and Collington throw back the curtain on the consulting industry. They dive deep into important case studies of consultants taking the reins with disastrous results, such as the debacle of the roll out of HealthCare.gov and the tragic failures of governments to respond adequately to the COVID-19 pandemic. The result is an important and exhilarating intellectual journey into the modern economy’s beating heart. With peerless scholarship, and a wealth of original research, Mazzucato and Collington argue brilliantly for building a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good.