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

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/620830 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Why We Hate: Understanding the Roots of Human Conflict Author: Michael Ruse Narrator: Mike Cooper Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 54 minutes Release date: October 25, 2022 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: An insightful and probing exploration of the contradiction between humans' enormous capacity for hatred and their evolutionary development as a social species Why We Hate tackles a pressing issue of both longstanding interest and fresh relevance: why a social species like Homo sapiens should nevertheless be so hateful to itself. We go to war and are prejudiced against our fellow human beings. We discriminate on the basis of nationality, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and gender. Why are humans at once so social and so hateful to each other? In this book, Michael Ruse looks at scientific understandings of human hatred, particularly Darwinian evolutionary theory. Combining rigorous argument with an engaging and accessible style, Ruse makes frequent use of historical examples, examining the history of two World Wars, and the US offensive against Iraq. He also gives many pertinent and up-to-date examples of prejudice, including the significance of Brexit and the systemic racism that lead to the Black Lives Matter movement. Ruse pays special attention to egregious cases of hatred, such as the treatment of Jews by the Third Reich, and to pressing contemporary issues, including the status of women. Ruse concludes with constructive suggestions for ways in which we might reconcile the contradictory aspects of our nature.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/619212 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement Author: Phoebe S.K. Young Narrator: Elizabeth Wiley Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 16 hours 2 minutes Release date: October 25, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 1 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: Camping appears to be a simple proposition, a time-honored way of getting away from it all. This book reveals that, for all its appeal, the simplicity of camping is deceptive, its history and meanings far from obvious. Why do some Americans find pleasure in sleeping outside, particularly when so many others, past and present, have had to do so for reasons other than recreation? Never only a vacation choice, camping has been something people do out of dire necessity and as a tactic of political protest. Yet the dominant interpretation of camping as a modern recreational ideal has obscured the connections to these other roles. Camping Grounds rediscovers unexpected and interwoven histories of sleeping outside. It uses extensive research to trace surprising links between veterans, tramps, John Muir, African American freedpeople, Indian communities, and early leisure campers in the nineteenth century; tin-can tourists, federal campground designers, Depression-era transients, family campers, backpacking enthusiasts, and political activists in the twentieth century; and the crisis of the unsheltered and the tent-based Occupy Movement in the twenty-first. These entwined stories show how Americans camp to claim a place in the American republic and why the outdoors is critical to how we relate to nature, the nation, and each other.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/625226 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan Author: Tobias Harris Narrator: Ward Sexton Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 14 hours 15 minutes Release date: October 25, 2022 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: Shinzo Abe entered politics burdened by high expectations: that he would change Japan. In 2007, seemingly overwhelmed, he resigned after only a year as prime minister. Yet, following five years of reinvention, he masterfully regained the premiership in 2012, and now dominates Japanese democracy as no leader has done before. Abe has inspired fierce loyalty among his followers, cowing Japan's left with his ambitious economic program and support for the security and armed forces. He has staked a leadership role for Japan in a region being rapidly transformed by the rise of China, and India, while carefully preserving an ironclad relationship with Trump's America. The Iconoclast tells the story of Abe's meteoric rise and stunning fall, his remarkable comeback, and his unlikely emergence as a global statesman laying the groundwork for Japan's survival in a turbulent century.

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/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/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/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/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.

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.