-
What World Is This?
- A Pandemic Phenomenology
- Narrated by: Wendy Tremont King
- Length: 4 hrs and 18 mins
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 $13.75
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's summary
The pandemic compels us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the world: the many ways humans rely on one another, how we vitally and sometimes fatally breathe the same air, share the surfaces of the earth, and exist in proximity to other porous creatures in order to live in a social world. What we require to live can also imperil our lives. How do we think from, and about, this common bind?
Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and all its consequences-political, social, ecological, economic-have challenged us to reconsider the sense of the world that such disasters bring about. Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and critical feminist phenomenology, Butler illuminates the conditions in which we seek to make sense of our disorientation, precarity, and social bonds. What World Is This? offers a new account of interdependency in which touching and breathing, capacities that amid a viral outbreak can threaten life itself, challenge the boundaries of the body and selfhood. Criticizing notions of unlimited personal liberty and the killing forces of racism, sexism, and classism, this book suggests that the pandemic illuminates the potential of shared vulnerabilities as well as the injustice of pervasive inequalities.
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Bodies That Matter
- On the Discursive Limits of Sex
- By: Judith Butler
- Narrated by: Kelly Burke
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Bodies That Matter, renowned theorist and philosopher Judith Butler argues that theories of gender need to return to the most material dimension of sex and sexuality: the body. Butler offers a brilliant reworking of the body, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain sex from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex.
-
-
Accessible version of Bodies That Matter
- By CJG on 10-27-22
By: Judith Butler
-
The Force of Nonviolence
- An Ethico-Political Bind
- By: Judith Butler
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how "racial phantasms" inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects.
-
-
Great, succinct overview of a more complicated than it seems at first glance.
- By Satyra on 07-28-24
By: Judith Butler
-
Gender Trouble
- Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
- By: Judith Butler
- Narrated by: Emily Beresford
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past 50 years, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, "essential" notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category "woman" and continues in this vein with examinations of "the masculine" and "the feminine." Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.
-
-
Been wanting for a long time to read Gender Trouble
- By GayIsGreat on 03-22-18
By: Judith Butler
-
Doppelganger
- A Trip into the Mirror World
- By: Naomi Klein
- Narrated by: Naomi Klein
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who.
-
-
Elite Psychobabble
- By A Reviewer on 09-30-23
By: Naomi Klein
-
Reflections
- Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
- By: Walter Benjamin
- Narrated by: Peter Demetz, Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.
-
-
W. B. Writes beautiful long sentences. yea!
- By Amazon Customer on 11-24-22
By: Walter Benjamin
-
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
- In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders, Phylicia Rashad, Nick Offerman, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
-
-
An innovative and fresh listening experience
- By Scott Garrioch on 01-14-21
By: George Saunders
-
Bodies That Matter
- On the Discursive Limits of Sex
- By: Judith Butler
- Narrated by: Kelly Burke
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Bodies That Matter, renowned theorist and philosopher Judith Butler argues that theories of gender need to return to the most material dimension of sex and sexuality: the body. Butler offers a brilliant reworking of the body, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain sex from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex.
-
-
Accessible version of Bodies That Matter
- By CJG on 10-27-22
By: Judith Butler
-
The Force of Nonviolence
- An Ethico-Political Bind
- By: Judith Butler
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how "racial phantasms" inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects.
-
-
Great, succinct overview of a more complicated than it seems at first glance.
- By Satyra on 07-28-24
By: Judith Butler
-
Gender Trouble
- Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
- By: Judith Butler
- Narrated by: Emily Beresford
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past 50 years, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, "essential" notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category "woman" and continues in this vein with examinations of "the masculine" and "the feminine." Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.
-
-
Been wanting for a long time to read Gender Trouble
- By GayIsGreat on 03-22-18
By: Judith Butler
-
Doppelganger
- A Trip into the Mirror World
- By: Naomi Klein
- Narrated by: Naomi Klein
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who.
-
-
Elite Psychobabble
- By A Reviewer on 09-30-23
By: Naomi Klein
-
Reflections
- Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
- By: Walter Benjamin
- Narrated by: Peter Demetz, Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.
-
-
W. B. Writes beautiful long sentences. yea!
- By Amazon Customer on 11-24-22
By: Walter Benjamin
-
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
- In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders, Phylicia Rashad, Nick Offerman, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
-
-
An innovative and fresh listening experience
- By Scott Garrioch on 01-14-21
By: George Saunders
-
The Future Is Disabled
- Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs
- By: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- Narrated by: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation?
-
-
Disability justice handbook
- By Alyssum M. Pohl on 03-17-24
-
Complaint!
- By: Sara Ahmed
- Narrated by: Pearl Hewitt
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.
-
-
The authors perspective and framing of doors
- By Safiya on 10-17-24
By: Sara Ahmed
-
Cannibal Capitalism
- How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It
- By: Nancy Fraser
- Narrated by: Kate Udall
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work.
-
-
A Work of Art!
- By Emily Meyers on 12-01-22
By: Nancy Fraser
-
Ain't I a Woman
- Black Women and Feminism (2nd Edition)
- By: bell hooks
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain't I a Woman has become a must for all those interested in the nature of Black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on Black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman's involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this work a critical place in every feminist scholar's library.
-
-
Informative
- By Cj James on 07-23-19
By: bell hooks
-
The Heat Will Kill You First
- Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
- By: Jeff Goodell
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The world is waking up to a new reality: wildfires are now seasonal in California, the Northeast is getting less and less snow each winter, and the ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctica are melting fast. Heat is the first order threat that drives all other impacts of the climate crisis. And as the temperature rises, it is revealing fault lines in our governments, our politics, our economy, and our values. The basic science is not complicated: Stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, and the global temperature will stop rising tomorrow.
-
-
Eminently Skipable for Climate Science Believers
- By Chad on 07-15-23
By: Jeff Goodell
-
Answer to Job
- By: C. G. Jung, R. F. C. Hull - translator
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 5 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For a world that over the past century has witnessed horrors the like of which could not have been imagined by earlier generations, Job’s cries of despair and incomprehension are all too recognisable. The visionary psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung understood this and responded with this remarkable book, in which he set himself face to face with 'the unvarnished spectacle of divine savagery and ruthlessness'.
-
-
man is not looking for God..God is looking for man
- By Nevets on 04-16-23
By: C. G. Jung, and others
-
Necropolitics
- By: Achille Mbembe, Steven Corcoran - translator
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side - what he calls its "nocturnal body" - which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism.
-
-
Forget critical race theory
- By Ian on 01-08-23
By: Achille Mbembe, and others
-
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
- A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917--2017
- By: Rashid Khalidi
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi, Rashid Khalidi - introduction
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members - mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists - The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age.
-
-
Thoroughly Researched and Evidence-Based, but...
- By K on 05-24-21
By: Rashid Khalidi
-
BBC Radio Shakespeare: A Collection of Eight Comedies
- By: William Shakespeare
- Narrated by: Anne-Marie Duff, David Tennant, Full Cast, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 28 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A collection of BBC Radio 3's iconic Shakespeare productions: eight comedies with all-star casts including David Tennant, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, Martin Jarvis, Siân Phillips and Miriam Margolyes. The plays included in this collection are: Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, and All's Well That Ends Well.
-
-
Not told entirely
- By Gabsalot on 12-11-21
-
Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition
- By: Paulo Freire, Myra Bergman Ramos - translator, Donaldo Macedo - foreword, and others
- Narrated by: Dennis Kleinman
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire's work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing. This 50th anniversary edition includes an updated introduction by Donaldo Macedo, a new afterword by Ira Shor, and many inspirational interviews.
-
-
Not easy listening
- By Berel Dov Lerner on 02-20-19
By: Paulo Freire, and others
-
Being and Time
- By: Martin Heidegger
- Narrated by: Martyn Swain, Taylor Carman
- Length: 23 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Being and Time was published in 1927 during the Weimar period in Germany, a time of political, social and economic turmoil. Heidegger himself did not escape the pressures and his nationalism, and undeniable anti-Semitism in the following decades cast a shadow over the man, but not the work. Being and Time is not coloured by expressions of his later views (unlike other writings) and remains an outstanding document.
-
-
Surprised it works as audio
- By Anonymous on 02-02-20
By: Martin Heidegger
-
Black and Blur
- Consent Not to Be a Single Being, Book 1
- By: Fred Moten
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Black and Blur - the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy Consent Not to Be a Single Being - Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of Blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms.
-
-
shakespeare called and wants their title as poet god back
- By Alejandro on 02-10-23
By: Fred Moten
Related to this topic
-
A Secular Age
- By: Charles Taylor
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 42 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we - in the West, at least - largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean - of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.
-
-
Needs Guest Narrators for French and German
- By Norman on 06-13-15
By: Charles Taylor
-
The Ascent of Humanity
- Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
- By: Charles Eisenstein
- Narrated by: Steve Wojtas
- Length: 27 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self. He argues that our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse.
-
-
I love this author!
- By Tamara Smith on 12-03-17
-
Irrationality
- A History of the Dark Side of Reason
- By: Justin E. H. Smith
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.
-
-
A good brain workout
- By ThomasC on 04-09-19
-
How Much is Enough?
- Money and the Good Life
- By: Edward Skidelsky
- Narrated by: Clay Teunis
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What constitutes the good life? What is the true value of money? Why do we work such long hours merely to acquire greater wealth? These are some of the questions that many asked themselves when the financial system crashed in 2008. This book tackles such questions head-on.The authors begin with the great economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1930 Keynes predicted that, within a century, per capita income would steadily rise, people’s basic needs would be met, and no one would have to work more than fifteen hours a week.
-
-
Not what I expected at all!
- By Chi on 05-22-23
By: Edward Skidelsky
-
The God Argument
- The Case Against Religion and for Humanism
- By: A. C. Grayling
- Narrated by: William Roberts
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What are the arguments for and against religion and religious belief - all of them - right across the range of reasons and motives that people have for being religious, and do they stand up to scrutiny? Can there be a clear, full statement of these arguments that once and for all will show what is at stake in this debate? Equally important: what is the alternative to religion as a view of the world and a foundation for morality?
-
-
Fascinating Topic Made Mind Numbingly Dull
- By m.emery on 06-17-15
By: A. C. Grayling
-
Civilization and Its Discontents, Totem and Taboo
- By: Sigmund Freud
- Narrated by: Martyn Swain
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is remembered as the father of psychoanalysis. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) is one of his key works, written three decades after his seminal book The Interpretation of Dreams. In it he considers the conflict between the needs of the individual acting both egotistically and altruistically in the pursuit of happiness and the myriad demands of civilised society and the ensuing tensions this clash of needs and demands generates.
By: Sigmund Freud
-
A Secular Age
- By: Charles Taylor
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 42 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we - in the West, at least - largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean - of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.
-
-
Needs Guest Narrators for French and German
- By Norman on 06-13-15
By: Charles Taylor
-
The Ascent of Humanity
- Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
- By: Charles Eisenstein
- Narrated by: Steve Wojtas
- Length: 27 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self. He argues that our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse.
-
-
I love this author!
- By Tamara Smith on 12-03-17
-
Irrationality
- A History of the Dark Side of Reason
- By: Justin E. H. Smith
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.
-
-
A good brain workout
- By ThomasC on 04-09-19
-
How Much is Enough?
- Money and the Good Life
- By: Edward Skidelsky
- Narrated by: Clay Teunis
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What constitutes the good life? What is the true value of money? Why do we work such long hours merely to acquire greater wealth? These are some of the questions that many asked themselves when the financial system crashed in 2008. This book tackles such questions head-on.The authors begin with the great economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1930 Keynes predicted that, within a century, per capita income would steadily rise, people’s basic needs would be met, and no one would have to work more than fifteen hours a week.
-
-
Not what I expected at all!
- By Chi on 05-22-23
By: Edward Skidelsky
-
The God Argument
- The Case Against Religion and for Humanism
- By: A. C. Grayling
- Narrated by: William Roberts
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What are the arguments for and against religion and religious belief - all of them - right across the range of reasons and motives that people have for being religious, and do they stand up to scrutiny? Can there be a clear, full statement of these arguments that once and for all will show what is at stake in this debate? Equally important: what is the alternative to religion as a view of the world and a foundation for morality?
-
-
Fascinating Topic Made Mind Numbingly Dull
- By m.emery on 06-17-15
By: A. C. Grayling
-
Civilization and Its Discontents, Totem and Taboo
- By: Sigmund Freud
- Narrated by: Martyn Swain
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is remembered as the father of psychoanalysis. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) is one of his key works, written three decades after his seminal book The Interpretation of Dreams. In it he considers the conflict between the needs of the individual acting both egotistically and altruistically in the pursuit of happiness and the myriad demands of civilised society and the ensuing tensions this clash of needs and demands generates.
By: Sigmund Freud
-
A Time to Build
- From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream
- By: Yuval Levin
- Narrated by: Ford Enlow
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse. Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription.
-
-
Incisive and Illuminating
- By Jakob on 01-26-23
By: Yuval Levin
-
Between Past and Future
- Eight Exercises in Political Thought
- By: Hannah Arendt
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hannah Arendt's insightful observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute an impassioned contribution to political philosophy. In Between Past and Future, Arendt describes the perplexing crises modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, and glory. Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill the vital essence of these concepts and use them to regain a frame of reference for the future.
-
-
Just stunning
- By Peter Stephens on 02-26-18
By: Hannah Arendt
-
What Are We Doing Here?
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexis de Tocqueville, inform our political consciousness or discussing how beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.
-
-
Unpersuasive and a bit repetitive
- By Adam Shields on 03-07-18
-
On Freedom
- Four Songs of Care and Constraint
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.
-
-
Just great
- By Kristi Strong on 12-14-21
By: Maggie Nelson
-
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands
- Thinkers of the New Left
- By: Roger Scruton
- Narrated by: Rory Barnett
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of the leading critics of leftist orientations comes a study of the thinkers who have most influenced the attitudes of the New Left. Beginning with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concluding with a critique of the key strands in its thinking, Roger Scruton conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. Scruton delivers a critique of modern left-wing thinking.
-
-
Deconstructing the New Left
- By Wayne on 01-17-20
By: Roger Scruton
-
The End of History and the Last Man
- By: Francis Fukuyama
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 15 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.
-
-
An important discussion expertly narrated
- By Kevin Teeple on 06-27-19
By: Francis Fukuyama
-
The Givenness of Things
- Essays
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope.
-
-
Mostly thoughts on religious things
- By Adam Shields on 01-26-16
-
Escape from Freedom
- By: Erich Fromm
- Narrated by: Anthony Haden Salerno
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
lf a man cannot stand freedom, he will probably turn fascist. This, in the fewest possible words, is the essential argument in this modem classic, Escape from Freedom. The author, Erich Fromm, is a distinguished psychologist, late of Berlin and Heidelberg, now of New York City.
-
-
Why is this not required reading in high school?
- By Xander on 09-07-16
By: Erich Fromm
-
On Augustine
- By: Rowan Williams
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Since his retirement as Archbishop of Canterbury and his return to academic life (Master of Magdalene College Cambridge), Rowan Williams has demonstrated a massive new surge of intellectual energy. In this new audiobook, he turns his attention to St Augustine. St Augustine not only shaped the development of Western theology, he also made a major contribution to political theory ( The City of God) and, through his Confessions, to the understanding of human psychology.
-
-
thoughtful take.
- By Michael McGuire on 04-17-22
By: Rowan Williams
-
Philosophy
- Who Needs It
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Who needs philosophy? Ayn Rand's answer: Everyone. This collection of essays was the last work planned by Ayn Rand before her death in 1982. In it, she summarizes her view of philosophy and deals with a broad spectrum of topics. According to Ayn Rand, the choice we make is not whether to have a philosophy, but which one to have: a rational, conscious, and therefore practical one, or a contradictory, unidentified, and ultimately lethal one.
-
-
Deep and provocative
- By Sierra Bravo on 05-21-09
By: Ayn Rand
-
The Social Construction of Reality
- A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge
- By: Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Called the "fifth-most important sociological book of the 20th century" by the International Sociological Association, this groundbreaking study of knowledge introduces the concept of "social construction" into the social sciences for the first time. In it, Berger and Luckmann reformulate the task of the sociological subdiscipline that, since Max Scheler, has been known as the sociology of knowledge.
-
-
Overwhelming the first listen
- By Fabian on 04-24-18
By: Peter L. Berger, and others
-
The Soul of the World
- By: Roger Scruton
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Soul of the World, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends the experience of the sacred against today’s fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone. To be fully alive - and to understand what we are - is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things.
-
-
"Against Reductionism"
- By Edmund Schilvold on 10-08-15
By: Roger Scruton