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

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/764018 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, Author of The Joy of Sex

Author: Eric Laursen

Narrator: Michael Butler Murray

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 31 hours 32 minutes

Release date: June 4, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Alex Comfort was a British poet, novelist, biologist, cultural critic, activist, and anarchist, and the author of the international bestseller, The Joy of Sex. He played a vital role in making gerontology (the study of aging) a viable branch of modern science, energizing the direct-action movement for nuclear disarmament, revitalizing anarchism as a political philosophy in the post-WWII decades, and persuading twelve million readers of his most popular book to banish guilt and anxiety from sex in favor of pleasure and closer human understanding. Comfort liked to say that everything he did was part of 'one big project': to bring about a new consciousness, grounded in science, of the importance of personal responsibility in human relationships, including the obligation to disobey when authority was being exercised abusively. Polymath traces the intersection in Comfort's life and work between biology and literature, anarchism and humanism, sex and sociality, and how his writings, research, and activism continue to shed critical light on the moral and political choices we make today. Laursen's book relates the event-filled life of a brilliant and complex figure, including his victory over a possibly career-ending disability, his tumultuous second marriage, his struggles with the scientific establishment, and the fascinating story of the making of The Joy of Sex.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/761219 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy

Author: Maxwell L. Stearns

Narrator: Maxwell L. Stearns

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 24 minutes

Release date: June 4, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Americans face increasingly stark choices each presidential election and a growing sense that our government can't solve the nation's most urgent challenges. Our eighteenth-century system is ill-suited to our twenty-first-century world. Information-age technology has undermined our capacity to face common problems together and turned our democracy upside down, with gerrymanders letting representatives choose voters rather than voters choosing them. In Parliamentary America, Maxwell L. Stearns argues that the solution to these complex problems is a parliamentary democracy. Stearns considers such leading alternatives as ranked choice voting, the national popular vote, and congressional term limits, showing why these can't solve our constitutional crisis. Instead, three amendments—expanding the House of Representatives, having House party coalitions choose the president, and letting the House end a failing presidency based on no confidence—will produce a robust multiparty democracy. Stearns takes listeners on a world tour—England, France, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, and Venezuela—showing what works in government, what doesn't, and how to make the best features our own. Genuine party competition and governing coalitions, commonplace across the globe, may seem like a fantasy in the United States. But we can make them a reality.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/751989 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Fear and the First Amendment: Controversial Cases of the Roberts Court

Author: Kevin A. Johnson, Craig R. Smith

Narrator: David Marantz

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 42 minutes

Release date: June 4, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

In Fear and the First Amendment, Kevin A. Johnson and Craig R. Smith offer an examination of the ways fear figures in First Amendment questions ruled on by the Supreme Court. Johnson and Smith focus on the rulings from the Roberts Court. Each chapter in this book analyzes one or more First Amendment cases and a variety of related fears that pertain to a given case. These cases include Morse v. Frederick, which takes up the competing fears of school administrators' loss of authority and students' loss of free speech rights. The authors touch on corporate funding of elections in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. They explore religious freedom and fears of homosexuality in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. Similarly, in Snyder v. Phelps, the authors delve further into fears of God, death, emotional distress, failing as a parent, and losing one's reputation. Next, they investigate parents' anxieties about violence in video games in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. Finally, Johnson and Smith examine the role of fear in indecent, obscene, and graphic communication in three cases. Together these cases reveal fear to be an endemic factor in the rhetoric of First Amendment cases. This work will appeal to current legal practitioners and students of law, rhetoric, philosophy, and the First Amendment.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/769034 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Bloody Tuesday: The Untold Story of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa

Author: John M. Giggie

Narrator: Christopher Grove

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 47 minutes

Release date: June 3, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

The dramatic story of one of the most violent episodes of the civil rights movement and its role in the ongoing reckoning with racial injustice in the United States. On Tuesday, June 9, 1964, police attacked more than 600 Black men, women, and children inside First African Baptist Church (Tuscaloosa, Alabama), where Reverend Martin Luther King had launched the Tuscaloosa campaign for integration three months earlier. As the group gathered to march, they faced over seventy law enforcement officers and hundreds more deputized white citizens and Klansmen eager to end their protests for good. Police smashed the historic church's stained-glass windows with water hoses and fired rounds of tear gas inside. As demonstrators streamed from the church, many choking and soaked, they beat them with nightsticks, cattle prods, and axe handles, arrested nearly a hundred, and sent over thirty to the hospital. Here this event is recounted through the eyes of locals—a charismatic Black preacher trained by Rev. King, an aging police chief, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Black women who were the backbone of the protests. In Bloody Tuesday, John Giggie powerfully recovers one of the last great untold stories of the civil rights movement and its role in the reckoning with America's ongoing struggle for racial justice.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/769026 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking

Author: Shannon Vallor

Narrator: Kim Niemi

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 5 minutes

Release date: June 3, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

For many, technology offers hope for the future—that promise of shared human flourishing and liberation that always seems to elude our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark this hope in a particular way. They promise a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome—not by us, but by our machines. Yet rather than open new futures, today's powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful but flawed mirrors, they reflect the same errors, biases, and failures of wisdom that we strive to escape. Our new digital mirrors point backward. They show only where the data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time. To meet today's grave challenges to our species and our planet, we will need something new from AI, and from ourselves. Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging, prophetic, and philosophical case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. Rejecting prophecies of doom, she encourages us to pursue technology that helps us recover our sense of the possible, and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world. Vallor calls us to rethink what AI is and can be, and what we want to be with it.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/773587 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Promise of Youth Anti-Citizenship: Race and Revolt in Education

Author: Kevin Lawrence Henry Jr., Kevin L. Clay

Narrator: Patryce Williams, William Andrew Quinn

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 32 minutes

Release date: May 28, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

When inclusion into the fold of citizenship is conditioned by a social group's conceit to ritual violence, humiliation, and exploitation, what can anti-citizenship offer us? The Promise of Youth Anti-citizenship argues that Black youth and youth of color have been cast as anti-citizens, disenfranchised from the social, political, and economic mainstream of American life. Instead of asking youth to conform to a larger societal structure undergirded by racial capitalism and antiblackness, the volume's contributors propose that the collective practice of anti-citizenship opens up a liberatory space for youth to challenge the social order. The chapters cover an array of topics, including Black youth in the charter school experiment in post-Katrina New Orleans; racial capitalism, the queering of ethnicity, and the 1980s Salvadoran migration to South Central Los Angeles; the notion of decolonizing classrooms through Palestinian liberation narratives; and more. Through a range of methodological approaches and conceptual interventions, this collection illuminates how youth negotiate and exercise anti-citizenship as forms of either resistance or refusal in response to coercive patriotism, cultural imperialism, and predatory capitalism.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/767015 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry

Author: Austin Frerick

Narrator: Stephen Bel Davies

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 56 minutes

Release date: May 28, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Barons is the story of seven corporate titans, their rise to power, and the consequences for everyone else. Take Mike McCloskey, chairman of Fair Oaks Farms. In a few short decades, he went from managing a modest dairy herd to running the Disneyland of agriculture. Mike benefited from deregulation of the American food industry, a phenomenon that has consolidated wealth in the hands of select tycoons, and along the way, hollowed out the nation's rural towns and local businesses. Along with Mike McCloskey, listeners will meet a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a decade, relying on wealth traced back to the Nazis to gobble up countless independent roasters. And they will learn that in the food business, crime really does pay—especially when you can bribe and then double-cross the president of Brazil. These, and the other stories in this book, are simply examples of the monopolies and ubiquitous corruption that today define American food. The tycoons profiled are hardly unique: many other companies have manipulated our lax laws and failed policies for their own benefit, to the detriment of our neighborhoods, livelihoods, and our democracy itself. A fair, healthy, and prosperous food industry is possible—if we take back power from the barons who have robbed us of it.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/760492 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade

Author: Krystale E. Littlejohn, Rickie Solinger

Narrator: Deanna Anthony

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 15 minutes

Release date: May 28, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

A fierce and galvanizing reminder that resistance is everywhere in the fight for abortion and reproductive justice in the United States. Fighting Mad is a book about what 'reproductive justice' means and what it looks like to fight for it. Editors Krystale E. Littlejohn and Rickie Solinger bring together many of the strongest, most resistant voices in the country to describe the impacts of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision on abortion access and care. The essayists and change agents gathered in Fighting Mad represent a remarkable breadth of expertise: activists and artists, academics and abortion storytellers, health care professionals and legislators, clinic directors and lawyers, and so many more. They discuss abortion restrictions and strategies to provide care, the impacts of criminalization, efforts to protect the targeted, shortcomings of the past, and visions for the next generation. Fighting Mad captures for the social and historical record the vigorous resistance happening in the early post-Roe moment to show that there are millions on the ground fighting to secure a better future.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/752016 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Moral Vision: Leadership from George Washington to Joe Biden

Author: Marvin Olasky

Narrator: Tim H. Dixon

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 14 hours 38 minutes

Release date: May 28, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

What makes a leader truly great? Is it simply a matter of management style and personality? Or is it character that matters most? Moral Visions takes an insightful look into America’s leaders of the past to answer these questions and demonstrates that values and moral convictions are critical to the strength of a nation. Supposedly, we learn about the candidates for the highest office through a series of tests called “debates,” which are instead an exchange of soundbites. We can’t know whether an aspirant to the presidency has the ability to ask good questions or only a suave or belligerent ability to answer them. Moral Vision is a human-interest introduction to American history through studies of nineteen leaders: presidents, almost presidents, a tycoon, a crusading journalist, and even a leading 19th century abortionist. Its lessons can help voters sort through the candidates in 2024 and beyond by measuring them against previous leaders—none of whom was faultless. It shows how the deepest views often grow out of religious belief and influence political goals, racial prejudices, sexual activities, uses of power, and senses of service. In his 1789 inaugural address, George Washington pledged that “the foundation for national policy will be laid in the sure and immutable principles of private morality.” Marvin Olasky shows how 19th-century leaders like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Grover Cleveland partly upheld and partly ignored that promise, and 20th-century leaders like Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton tried to “compartmentalize” the private and the public. An extensively updated version of The American Leadership Tradition, Moral Vision is for anyone tired of today’s textbook tendencies to submerge the role of individuals as big economic and demographic waves roll in. History is more than statistics, economics, and group identities. Human beings are more than paper boats riding the rainfall into gutters.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/751973 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Russian FSB: A Concise History of the Federal Security Service

Author: Kevin P. Riehle

Narrator: Nigel Patterson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 0 minutes

Release date: May 28, 2024

Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics

Publisher's Summary:

Since its founding in 1995, the FSB, Russia's Federal Security Service, has regained the majority of the domestic security functions of the Soviet-era KGB. Under Vladimir Putin, who served as FSB director just before becoming president, the agency has grown to be one of the most powerful and favored organizations in Russia. The FSB not only conducts internal security but also has primacy in intelligence operations in former Soviet states. Their activities include anti-dissident operations at home and abroad, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, criminal investigations of crimes against the state, and guarding Russia's borders. In The Russian FSB, Kevin P. Riehle provides a brief history of the FSB's origins, placed within the context of Russian history, the government's power structure, and Russia's wider culture. He describes how the FSB's mindset and priorities show continuities from the tsarist regimes and the Soviet era. The book's chapters analyze origins, organizational structure, missions, leaders, international partners, and cultural representations such as the FSB in film and television. Based on both English and Russian sources, this book is a well-researched introduction to understanding the FSB and its central role in Putin's Russia.