Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C.

S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C.

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 34 mins)
• By Ruben Castaneda
• Narrated By Stephen Bel Davies
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During the height of the crack epidemic that decimated the streets of D.C., Ruben Castaneda covered the crime beat for the Washington Post. The first in his family to graduate from college, he had landed a job at one of the country’s premier newspapers. But his apparent success masked a devastating secret: he was a crack addict. Even as he covered the drug-fueled violence that was destroying the city, he was prowling S Street, a 24/7 open-air crack market, during his off hours, looking for his next fix.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 10 mins)
• By Matthew Desmond
• Narrated By Dion Graham
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In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the $20 a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup after her hours are cut.

The Last of the Black Emperors: The Hollow Comeback of Marion Barry in a New Age of Black Leaders

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 35 mins)
• By Jonetta Barras
• Narrated By Ronald Clarkson
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A gripping, informative, and balanced assessment of a commanding and perplexing American politician - the first by a black journalist.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

• UNABRIDGED (19 hrs and 46 mins)
• By Edward E. Baptist
• Narrated By Ron Butler
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In The Half Has Never Been Told, historian Edward E. Baptist reveals the alarming extent to which slavery shaped our country politically, morally, and most of all, economically. Until the Civil War, our chief form of innovation was slavery. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from their slaves, giving the country a virtual monopoly on the production of cotton, a key raw material of the Industrial Revolution.

Between the World and Me

• UNABRIDGED (3 hrs and 35 mins)
• By Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Narrated By Ta-Nehisi Coates
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"This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it." In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race", a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 55 mins)
• By Jane Mayer
• Narrated By Kirsten Potter
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Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against "big government" led to the rise of a broad-based conservative movement.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

• UNABRIDGED (13 hrs and 16 mins)
• By Michelle Alexander
• Narrated By Karen Chilton
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In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Michelle Alexander reveals, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.

The American Civil War

• ORIGINAL (24 hrs and 36 mins)
• By The Great Courses, Gary W. Gallagher
• Narrated By Professor Gary W. Gallagher

Between 1861 and 1865, the clash of the greatest armies the Western hemisphere had ever seen turned small towns, little-known streams, and obscure meadows in the American countryside into names we will always remember. In those great battles, those streams ran red with blood-and the United States was truly born.

The Foundations of Western Civilization

• ORIGINAL (24 hrs and 54 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Thomas F. X. Noble

What is Western Civilization? According to Professor Noble, it is "much more than human and political geography," encompassing myriad forms of political and institutional structures - from monarchies to participatory republics - and its own traditions of political discourse. It involves choices about who gets to participate in any given society and the ways in which societies have resolved the tension between individual self-interest and the common good.

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 14 mins)
• By Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer
• Narrated By Allyson Johnson
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There are, in the United States, a significant and growing number of families who live on less than $2.00 per person, per day. That figure, the World Bank measure of poverty, is hard to imagine in this country - most of us spend more than that before we get to work or school in the morning.

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 4 mins)
• By Carrie Brownstein
• Narrated By Carrie Brownstein
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Before Carrie Brownstein became a music icon, she was a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest just as it was becoming the setting for one the most important movements in rock history. Seeking a sense of home and identity, she would discover both while moving from spectator to creator in experiencing the power and mystery of a live performance.

Lincoln's Citadel: The Civil War In Washington, DC

• UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 3 mins)
• By Kenneth J. Winkle
• Narrated By Robert Fass
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Lincoln's Citadel is a fresh, absorbing narrative history of Lincoln’s leadership in Civil War Washington. Here is the vivid story of how the Lincoln administration met the immense challenges the war posed to the city, transforming a vulnerable capital into a bastion for the Union.

Writing Creative Nonfiction

• ORIGINAL (12 hrs and 16 mins)
• By The Great Courses, Tilar J J. Mazzeo
• Narrated By Professor Tilar J J. Mazzeo

Bringing together the imaginative strategies of fiction storytelling and new ways of narrating true, real-life events, creative nonfiction is the fastest-growing part of the creative writing world. It's a cutting-edge genre that's reshaping how we write (and read) everything from biographies and memoirs to blogs and public speaking scripts to personal essays and magazine articles.

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

• UNABRIDGED (25 hrs and 23 mins)
• By David Talbot
• Narrated By Peter Altschuler

An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful - and secretive - colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times best seller Brothers.

The History of White People

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 9 mins)
• By Nell Irvin Painter
• Narrated By Allyson Johnson
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A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of notions of white race—not merely a skin color but also a signal of power, prestige, and beauty to be withheld and granted selectively. Ever since the Enlightenment, race theory and its inevitable partner, racism, have followed a crooked road, constructed by dominant peoples to justify their domination of others. Filling a huge gap in historical literature that long focused on the non-white, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, tracing not only the invention of the idea of race but also the frequent worship of “whiteness” for economic, social, scientific, and political ends.

The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 28 mins)
• By Dale Russakoff
• Narrated By Pete Cross

When Mark Zuckerberg announced in front of a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the Newark Schools - and to solve the education crisis in every city in America - it looked like a huge win for then-mayor Cory Booker and governor Chris Christie. But their plans soon ran into a constituency not so easily moved - Newark's key education players, fiercely protective of their billion-dollar-per-annum system.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 27 mins)
• By Thomas Frank
• Narrated By Thomas Frank
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It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

• UNABRIDGED (41 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Doris Kearns Goodwin
• Narrated By Suzanne Toren

On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry. Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war.

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

• UNABRIDGED (13 hrs and 28 mins)
• By Jill Leovy
• Narrated By Rebecca Lowman
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Audie Award, Non-Fiction, 2016. On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home--one of the thousands of black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes.

The Great Divide: The Conflict Between Washington and Jefferson That Defined a Nation

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 22 mins)
• By Thomas Fleming
• Narrated By David Rapkin

History tends to cast the early years of America in a glow of camaraderie when there were, in fact, many conflicts between the Founding Fathers - none more important than the one between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Their disagreement centered on the highest, most original public office created by the Constitutional Convention: the presidency. It also involved the nation's foreign policy, the role of merchants and farmers in a republic, and the durability of the union.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

• UNABRIDGED (22 hrs and 42 mins)
• By Isabel Wilkerson
• Narrated By Robin Miles, Ken Burns
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In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to previously untapped data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

• UNABRIDGED (66 hrs and 11 mins)
• By Robert A. Caro
• Narrated By Robertson Dean

Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders have known: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of our time in the City and in the State of New York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in which politics really happens - the way things really get done in America's City Halls and Statehouses - and brings to light a bonanza of vital new information.

Purity: A Novel

• UNABRIDGED (25 hrs)
• By Jonathan Franzen
• Narrated By Jenna Lamia, Dylan Baker, Robert Petkoff
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Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.

The History of the Sunni and Shia Split: Understanding the Divisions within Islam

• UNABRIDGED (1 hr and 25 mins)
• By Charles River Editors
• Narrated By Colin Fluxman
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Different branches of the same religion are the exception more than the rule, and they have had a profound impact upon history. The schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches influenced relationships between nations across Europe, and religious intolerance based on different Christian faiths led to persecution and outright violence across the continent for centuries.