
We All Want to Change the World
My Journey Through Social Justice Movements from the 1960s to Today
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed

Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $20.25
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
JD Jackson
About this listen
A sweeping look back at the protest movements that changed America from activist and NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, with personal and historical insights into lessons they can teach us today
“A compelling case for standing up for justice at a time when everything, it seems, is on the line.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
For many, it can feel like change takes too long, and it might seem that we have not moved very far. But political activist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar believes that public protest is a vital part of affecting change, even if that change doesn’t come “right now.”
In We All Want to Change the World, he examines the activism of people of all ages, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds that helped change America, documenting events from the Free Speech Movement through the movement for civil rights, the fight for women’s and LGBTQ rights, and, of course, the protests against the Vietnam War. At a time in our history when we are witnessing protests across campuses, within the labor movement, and following the killing of George Floyd, Abdul-Jabbar reminds us that protests are a lifeblood of our history:
“Protest movements, even peaceful ones, are never popular at first. . . . But there is a reason protest gatherings have been so frequent throughout history: They are effective. The United States exists because of them.”
Part history lesson and part personal reminiscences of his own activism, We All Want to Change the World will resonate with anyone who recognizes the need for social change and is willing to do the work to make it happen.
©2025 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Raymond Obstfeld (P)2025 Random House AudioCritic reviews
“Here, Kareem Abdul’s-Jabbar exhibits the retrospective vision of a historian, the analytical discipline and clarity of a social scientist, and the passion and compassion of the life-long social change activist that he has been.”—Harry Edwards, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus: Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley
“Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has never shied away from using the fame he achieved through his transcendent basketball talents to speak out about critically important issues, particularly around equality and social justice. The perspectives he shares in this book reflect his decades of activism and his hunger to inspire others to stand up for what is right.”—Adam Silver, NBA Commissioner
“With wisdom, compassion, and humility, this book reminds readers that the ideals of equality and justice are works in progress that each generation is tasked with transforming into reality. A timely reflection on protest movements that also chronicles how a beloved champion came to political consciousness.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Becoming Kareem
- Growing Up on and off the Court
- By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Raymond Obstfeld
- Narrated by: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At one time Lew Alcindor was just another kid from New York City with all the usual problems: He struggled with fitting in, with pleasing a strict father, and with overcoming shyness that made him feel socially awkward. But with a talent for basketball and an unmatched team of supporters, Lew Alcindor was able to transform and to become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
-
-
Concise and great
- By Clint Zenk on 06-23-20
By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and others
-
Coach Wooden and Me
- Our 50-Year Friendship on and off the Court
- By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- Narrated by: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1965, 18-year old Lew Alcindor played basketball for Coach John Wooden at UCLA. It was the beginning of what was to become a 50-year long relationship. On the court they broke basketball records. Off the court they transcended their athletic achievements to gain even wider recognition and tremendous national respect.
-
-
A WONDERFUL TRIBUTE
- By Cynthia I Tyree on 05-25-17
-
The Hollow Half
- A Memoir of Bodies and Borders
- By: Sarah Aziza
- Narrated by: Sarah Aziza
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza’s crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.
-
-
way too political
- By V. Thorson on 05-31-25
By: Sarah Aziza
-
On the Shoulders of Giants
- My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance
- By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Raymond Obstfeld
- Narrated by: Richard Allen
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In On the Shoulders of Giants, indomitable basketball star and best-selling author and historian Kareem Abdul-Jabbar invites listeners on an extraordinarily personal journey back to his birthplace. He leads us through one of the greatest political, cultural, literary, and artistic movements in our history, revealing the tremendous impact the Harlem Renaissance had on both American culture and his own life.
-
-
The best of both worlds
- By Marianne on 10-06-08
By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and others
-
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club
- Surviving Iran's Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes
- By: Sepideh Gholian
- Narrated by: Ashraf Shirazi
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors: they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet—in spite of anything and everything—they resist: they bake. They console each other, cry together, dance together. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a call to stand up for Woman, Life, Freedom by a woman still fighting for a free Iran.
By: Sepideh Gholian
-
Kuleana
- A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai'i
- By: Sara Kehaulani Goo
- Narrated by: Sara Kehaulani Goo
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From an early age, Sara Kehaulani Goo was enchanted by her family’s land in Hawai‘i. The vast area on the rugged shores of Maui’s east side—given by King Kamehameha III in 1848—extends from mountain to sea, encompassing ninety acres of lush, undeveloped rainforest jungle along the rocky coastline and a massive sixteenth-century temple with a mysterious past. When a property tax bill arrives with a 500 percent increase, Sara and her family members are forced to make a decision about the property: fight to keep the land or sell to the next offshore millionaire.
-
Becoming Kareem
- Growing Up on and off the Court
- By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Raymond Obstfeld
- Narrated by: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At one time Lew Alcindor was just another kid from New York City with all the usual problems: He struggled with fitting in, with pleasing a strict father, and with overcoming shyness that made him feel socially awkward. But with a talent for basketball and an unmatched team of supporters, Lew Alcindor was able to transform and to become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
-
-
Concise and great
- By Clint Zenk on 06-23-20
By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and others
-
Coach Wooden and Me
- Our 50-Year Friendship on and off the Court
- By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- Narrated by: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1965, 18-year old Lew Alcindor played basketball for Coach John Wooden at UCLA. It was the beginning of what was to become a 50-year long relationship. On the court they broke basketball records. Off the court they transcended their athletic achievements to gain even wider recognition and tremendous national respect.
-
-
A WONDERFUL TRIBUTE
- By Cynthia I Tyree on 05-25-17
-
The Hollow Half
- A Memoir of Bodies and Borders
- By: Sarah Aziza
- Narrated by: Sarah Aziza
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza’s crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.
-
-
way too political
- By V. Thorson on 05-31-25
By: Sarah Aziza
-
On the Shoulders of Giants
- My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance
- By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Raymond Obstfeld
- Narrated by: Richard Allen
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In On the Shoulders of Giants, indomitable basketball star and best-selling author and historian Kareem Abdul-Jabbar invites listeners on an extraordinarily personal journey back to his birthplace. He leads us through one of the greatest political, cultural, literary, and artistic movements in our history, revealing the tremendous impact the Harlem Renaissance had on both American culture and his own life.
-
-
The best of both worlds
- By Marianne on 10-06-08
By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and others
-
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club
- Surviving Iran's Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes
- By: Sepideh Gholian
- Narrated by: Ashraf Shirazi
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors: they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet—in spite of anything and everything—they resist: they bake. They console each other, cry together, dance together. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a call to stand up for Woman, Life, Freedom by a woman still fighting for a free Iran.
By: Sepideh Gholian
-
Kuleana
- A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai'i
- By: Sara Kehaulani Goo
- Narrated by: Sara Kehaulani Goo
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From an early age, Sara Kehaulani Goo was enchanted by her family’s land in Hawai‘i. The vast area on the rugged shores of Maui’s east side—given by King Kamehameha III in 1848—extends from mountain to sea, encompassing ninety acres of lush, undeveloped rainforest jungle along the rocky coastline and a massive sixteenth-century temple with a mysterious past. When a property tax bill arrives with a 500 percent increase, Sara and her family members are forced to make a decision about the property: fight to keep the land or sell to the next offshore millionaire.
-
This Dog Will Change Your Life
- By: Elias Weiss Friedman, Ben Greenman - contributor
- Narrated by: Elias Weiss Friedman
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This book weaves together stories of the many dogs Elias has been lucky enough to know, both in his personal life and while doing his Dogist work. Told in a light tone that does not shy away from more serious issues (Elias is not above the occasional sentimental moment or dog pun), this book charmingly explores the ways that dogs are not just our family and our friends but also irreplaceable beings capable of generating boundless love and restoring balance to our lives.
By: Elias Weiss Friedman, and others
-
Yet Here I Am
- Lessons from a Black Man's Search for Home
- By: Jonathan Capehart
- Narrated by: Jonathan Capehart
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Pulitzer Prize winning writer, editor and TV host Jonathan Capehart recounts powerful stories from his life about embracing identity, picking battles, seizing opportunity and finding his voice.
-
-
Great book
- By Vicki Hoffman on 05-31-25
-
Great Black Hope
- A Novel
- By: Rob Franklin
- Narrated by: Justice Smith, Rob Franklin
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not. It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, the daughter of a famous soul singer, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as lingering questions around how well he really knew his closest friend.
By: Rob Franklin
-
Life and Art
- Essays
- By: Richard Russo
- Narrated by: Richard Russo
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Life and Art—these are the twin subjects considered in Richard Russo’s twelve masterful new essays—how they inform each other and how the stories we tell ourselves about both shape our understanding of the world around us. In “The Lives of Others,” he reflects on the implacable fact that writers use people, insisting that what matters, in the end, is how and for what purpose. How do you bridge the gap between what you know and what you don’t, and sometimes can’t, know?
-
-
Phenomenal writing!
- By Boni Lamson on 05-15-25
By: Richard Russo
-
Erased
- What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us
- By: Anna Malaika Tubbs
- Narrated by: Anna Malaika Tubbs
- Length: 12 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Across the world, patriarchy has oppressed women and denied their contributions, but every nation has its own unique gendered hierarchy. Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs applies her signature approachable yet rigorous analysis to define American patriarchy in this definitive and groundbreaking history. Humanity in the United States is determined by gender in a limited and flawed binary logic that is also always tied to whiteness. Tubbs shows how a fabricated hierarchy became so deeply ingrained in the country over time that it now goes unnoticed, along with everything it intentionally conceals.
-
Black Cop's Kid
- An Essay
- By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 1 hr and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s deeply personal essay explores racial conflict through the prism of his childhood and the influence of his father, a police officer who walked the beat between two worlds.
-
-
Learned things I didn’t know
- By Sammi on 01-31-24
-
The Dry Season
- A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break: For three months she would abstain from dating, relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another with men and women. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her midthirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster.
By: Melissa Febos
-
200 Dangerous Truths About Project 2025
- Exposing the Real Threat to America’s Freedom and Democracy
- By: J. E. Fowlers
- Narrated by: Sharman Beth
- Length: 1 hr and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From J.E. Fowlers, best-selling author of Democracy at Risk, comes a groundbreaking exposé that uncovers the chilling truths behind Project 2025, a carefully orchestrated conservative blueprint threatening to reshape America’s democracy. 200 Dangerous Truths About Project 2025 tears apart the mystery, revealing 200 alarming facts straight from the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, organized into 20 powerful chapters.
-
-
Terrible. Just terrible.
- By Ian Dolby on 02-24-25
By: J. E. Fowlers
-
Notes to John
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Julianne Moore
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods.
-
-
This autobiography discusses notes from therapy regarding Joan’s daughter’s addiction. Very insightful!
- By Laura Borealis on 04-24-25
By: Joan Didion
-
The Purposeful Warrior
- Standing Up for What's Right When the Stakes Are High
- By: Jocelyn Benson
- Narrated by: Amanda Seyfried, Jocelyn Benson, Maria Shriver
- Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As Michigan’s Secretary of State and chief election official, Jocelyn Benson has overseen several of the highest turnout, most secure elections in the state’s history. But her life changed one snowy evening in December 2020 when armed protesters descended onto her doorstep, threatening her family. Her only crime: certifying a fair and accurate Presidential election in which the protesters’ preferred candidate–Donald Trump–did not win. Benson refused to back down. She stood her ground, spoke out louder, and helped expose and defeat a coordinated national effort to overturn the election.
-
-
Michiganders are lucky to have her
- By Dave T. on 05-11-25
By: Jocelyn Benson
-
The Afterlife of Malcolm X
- An Outcast Turned Icon's Enduring Impact on America
- By: Mark Whitaker
- Narrated by: David Sadzin
- Length: 14 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With impeccable research and original reporting, Mark Whitaker tells the story of Malcolm X’s far-reaching posthumous legacy. It stretches from founders of the Black Power Movement such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton to hip-hop pioneers such as Public Enemy and Tupac Shakur. Leaders of the Black Arts and Free Jazz movements from Amiri Baraka to Maya Angelou, August Wilson, and John Coltrane credited their political awakening to Malcolm, as did some of the most influential athletes of our time, from Muhammad Ali to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and beyond.
-
-
Excellent
- By SciFi-Nerd on 05-18-25
By: Mark Whitaker
-
Poets Square
- A Memoir in Thirty Cats
- By: Courtney Gustafson
- Narrated by: Courtney Gustafson
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Courtney Gustafson moved into a rental house in the Poets Square neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, she didn’t know that the property came with thirty feral cats. Focused only on her own survival—in a new relationship, during a pandemic, with poor mental health and a job that didn’t pay enough—Courtney was reluctant to spend any of her own time or money caring for the wayward animals.
-
-
Beautiful reflection on humanity seen through cat rescue
- By thiscitygirl on 05-26-25