Banaji, Mahzarin R. & Anthony G. Greenwald. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Brilliance. ISBN 9781491528730. Read by Eric Martin.
Banaji and Greenwald explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. The authors question the extent to which our perceptions of social groups—without our awareness or conscious control—shape our likes and dislikes and our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential. The book’s “good people” are those of us who strive to align our behavior with our intentions, and the authors aim to explain the science in plain enough language to help well-intentioned people achieve that alignment.
Bondar, Carin. Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504727600. Read by Erin Bennett.
The animal kingdom is a wild place—and it’s got mating habits to match. The sex lives of our animal cousins are fiendishly difficult, infinitely varied, often incredibly violent—and absolutely fascinating. Bondar takes listeners on an enthralling tour of the animal kingdom as she explores the diverse world of sex in the wild. She looks at the evolution of sexual organs (and how they’ve shaped social hierarchies), tactics of seduction, and the mechanics of sex. She investigates a wide range of topics, from whether animals experience pleasure from sex to what happens when females hold the reproductive power.
Cooper, Andrew Scott. The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran. Blackstone. ISBN 9781504723497. Read by Assaf Cohen.
Cooper traces Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s life from childhood through his ascension to the throne in 1941, highlighting the turbulence of the postwar era, during which the shah survived assassination attempts and coup plots to build a modern, pro-Western state and launch Iran onto the world stage as one of the world’s top five powers. Listeners get the story of the shah’s political career alongside the story of his courtship and marriage to Farah Diba, who became a power in her own right; the beloved family they created; and an exclusive look at life inside the palace during the Iranian Revolution. Cooper’s investigative account ultimately delivers the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty through the eyes of those who were there: leading Iranian revolutionaries, President Jimmy Carter and White House officials, U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan and his staff in the American embassy in Tehran, American families caught up in the drama, and Empress Farah herself.
Crowley, Roger. 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478914372. Reader TBA.
Constantinople had survived a siege every 40 years for a millennium—until the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, 21 years old and hungry for glory, rode up to the walls in April 1453 with a huge army, ”numberless as the stars.” This is the taut, vivid story of this final struggle for the city told largely through the accounts of eyewitnesses. For 55 days a tiny group of defenders defied the huge Ottoman army in a seesawing contest fought on land, at sea, and underground. During the course of events, the largest cannon ever built was directed against the world’s most formidable defensive system, Ottoman ships were hauled overland into the Golden Horn, and the morale of defenders was crucially undermined by unnerving portents. At the center is the contest between two inspirational leaders, Mehmed II and Constantine XI, fighting for empire and religious faith, and an astonishing finale in a few short hours on May 29, 1453 — a defining moment for medieval history.
Gilbert, Christine. Mother Tongue: My Family’s Globe-Trotting Quest to Dream in Mandarin, Laugh in Arabic, and Sing in Spanish. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501905582. Read by Angela Dawe.
Gilbert takes listeners along on her quest to learn Mandarin in Beijing, Arabic in Beirut, and Spanish in Mexico, with her young family along for the ride, showing us what it’s like to make a life in an unfamiliar world—and in an unfamiliar tongue. Gilbert was a young mother when she uprooted her family to move around the world with her toddler son and all-American husband along for the ride. Their story takes us from Beijing to Beirut, from Cyprus to Chiang Mai—and also explores recent breakthroughs in bilingual brain mapping and the controversial debates happening in linguistics right now.
McGinty, Brian. The Rest I Will Kill: William Tillman and the Unforgettable Story of How a Free Black Man Refused To Become a Slave. HighBridge. ISBN 9781681682303. Read by Sean Crisden.
On July 4, 1861, the schooner S.J. Waring set sail from New York on a routine voyage to South America. Seventeen days later, it limped back into New York’s harbor with the ship’s black cook and steward at the helm. While the story of that ill-fated voyage is one of the most harrowing tales of captivity and survival on the high seas, it has been tragically lost to history. Now reclaiming William Tillman as the American hero he deserves to be, historian McGinty takes readers on a courageous journey that recounts how a free black man was able to recapture his commandeered ship from Confederate privateers, defy their efforts to make him a slave, and become an unlikely glimmer of hope for a disheartened Union army in the war-battered North.
Pyne, Lydia. Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils. Tantor. ISBN 9781515956020. Read by Randye Kaye.
Over the last century, the search for human ancestors has spanned four continents and resulted in the discovery of hundreds of fossils. While most of these discoveries live quietly in museums, there are a few that have become world-renowned celebrity personas. Drawing from archives, museums, and interviews, Pyne builds a cultural history for each celebrity fossil. These seven include the three-foot tall “hobbit” from Flores, the Neanderthal of La Chapelle, the Taung Child, the Piltdown Man hoax, Peking Man, Australopithecus sediba, and Lucy—all vivid examples of how discoveries of our ancestors have been received, remembered, and immortalized. Pyne brings to life each fossil: how it is described, put on display, and shared among scientific communities and the broader public.
Reece, Erik. Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea. Tantor. ISBN 9781515957935. Read by James Patrick Cronin.
Reece was newly married, gainfully employed, and living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods, but he was still haunted by a sense that the world—or, more specifically, his country—could be better. Reece turned to those who had dared to imagine radically different futures for America. What followed was a giant road trip and research adventure through the sites of America’s utopian communities, both historical and contemporary, known and unknown, successful and catastrophic. What he uncovered was not just a series of lost histories and broken visionaries but also a continuing and vital but hidden idealistic tradition in American intellectual history.
Schuman, Michael. Confucius: And the World He Created. Dreamscape. ISBN 9781520020235. Read by Steven Menasche.
Confucius’s teachings shape the daily lives of more than 1.6 billion people. Throughout East Asia, Confucius’s influence can be seen in everything from business practices and family relationships to educational standards and government policies. Even as western ideas from Christianity to Communism have bombarded the region, Confucius’s doctrine has endured as the foundation of East Asian culture. It is impossible to understand East Asia,Schuman argues, without first engaging with Confucius and his vast legacy.
Smith, Mychal Denzel. Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501925375. Read by Kevin R. Free.
How do you learn to be a black man in America? For young black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama. It means witnessing the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and too many more. It means celebrating powerful moments of black self-determination for LeBron James, Dave Chappelle, and Frank Ocean. Here Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years, describing his efforts to come into his own in a world that denied his humanity.
Spiegelman, Nadja. I’m Supposed To Protect You from All This. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780735205598. Read by the author.
For a long time, Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers—art director Françoise Mouly—exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. After college, her mother suddenly opened up to her. Françoise recounted her turbulent adolescence caught between a volatile mother and a playboy father, one of the first plastic surgeons in France. It had taken an ocean to allow Françoise the distance to become her own person. At about the same age, Nadja made the journey in reverse, moving to Paris determined to get to know the woman her mother had fled. Her grandmother’s memories contradicted her mother’s at nearly every turn, but beneath them lay a difficult history of her own.
Summerscale, Kate. The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer. Recorded Books. ISBN 9781501919978. Reader TBA.
Early in the morning of July 8, 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother Nattie set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbors, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next ten days Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents’ valuables to fund trips to the theater and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate from the building. When the police were finally called to investigate, the discovery they made sent the press into a frenzy of horror and alarm, and Robert and Nattie were swept up in a criminal trial that echoed the outrageous plots of the ‘penny dreadful’ novels that Robert loved to read.
Toobin, Jeffrey. American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst. Books on Tape. ISBN 9780449807521. Read by Paul Michael.
On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.” The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing—the Hearst family trying to secure Patty’s release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Francisco for free; the bank security cameras capturing “Tania” wielding a machine gun during a robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from Bill Walton to the Black Panthers to Ronald Reagan to F. Lee Bailey; the largest police shoot-out in American history; the first breaking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the country; Patty’s year on the lam, running from authorities; and her circuslike trial, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal, after which the term “Stockholm syndrome” entered the lexicon.
Wolfe, Tom. The Kingdom of Speech. Hachette Audio. ISBN 9781478953166. Reader TBA.
Wolfe here makes the argument that speech—not evolution—is responsible for humanity’s complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, and finds it irrelevant.
Yong, Ed. I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grader View of Life. HarperAudio. ISBN 9781504734486. Reader TBA.
Every animal, whether human, squid, or wasp, is home to millions of bacteria and other microbes. Many people think of microbes as germs to be eradicated, but those that live with us—the microbiome—build our bodies, protect our health, shape our identities, and grant us incredible abilities. Yong takes listeners on a grand tour through our microbial partners, and introduces us to the scientists on the front lines of discovery.