Expand your knowledge with the best non-fiction audiobooks covering fascinating real-world topics. Our diverse collection spans science, philosophy, psychology, current events, and more—all presented by authoritative voices who make complex subjects accessible and engaging. Perfect for curious minds seeking to understand our world better.
Blacky the Crow is a clever rascal who lives in the Green Forest and Meadow. He loves to play tricks on the other little people who are his neighbours, and is curious about Farmer Brown’s Boy. Blacky is always thinking about what is right and what is wrong, but he still gets into all kinds of mischief. – Summary by Jude Somers
Critical-thinking skills are essential for life in the 21st century. In this follow-up to his introductory guide Think, and continuing his trademark of hopeful skepticism, Guy Harrison demonstrates in a detailed fashion how to sort through bad ideas, unfounded claims, and bogus information to drill down to the most salient facts. By explaining how the human brain works, and outing its most irrational processes, this book provides the thinking tools that will help you make better decisions, ask the right questions (at the right time), know what to look for when evaluating information, and understand how your own brain subconsciously clouds your judgment.
Think you’re too smart to be easily misled? Harrison summarizes scientific research showing how easily even intelligent and well-educated people can be fooled. We all suffer from cognitive biases, embellished memories, and the tendency to kowtow to authority figures or be duped by dubious ‘truths’ packaged in appealing stories. And as primates we are naturally status seekers, so we are prone to irrational beliefs that seem to enhance our sense of belonging and ranking. Emotional impulses and stress also all too often lead us into traps of misperception and bad judgment.
Understanding what science has discovered about the brain makes you better equipped to cope with its built-in pitfalls. Good Thinking–the book and the practice– makes clear that with knowledge and the right thinking skills, anyone can lead a safer, wiser, more efficient, and productive life.
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
‘My Grandmother’s Hands will change the direction of the movement for racial justice.’— Robin DiAngelo, New York Times bestselling author of White Fragility
In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology.
The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn’t just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans—our police.
My Grandmother’s Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.
Paves the way for a new, body-centered understanding of white supremacy—how it is literally in our blood and our nervous system.
Offers a step-by-step healing process based on the latest neuroscience and somatic healing methods, in addition to incisive social commentary.
The contemporary companion to Sun-tzu’s The Art of War, this brilliant distillation of the strategies of war can help us gain mastery in the modern world.< Spanning world civilizations, synthesizing dozens of political, philosophical, and religious texts and thousands of years of violent conflict, this is a comprehensive guide to getting ahead and staying there. Each chapter outlines an approach that will help you win your life's wars. Learn the offensive strategies that require you to maintain the initiative and negotiate from a position of strength, and the defensive strategies that enable you to respond to dangerous situations and avoid situations where winning is impossible.< As in The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene uses illustrative examples from history: Lyndon Johnson's tenacity, Julius Caesar's decisiveness, Joan Crawford's refusal to compromise, Ted Williams's competitive drive, and the folly and genius of everyone from Napoleon to Margaret Thatcher, Shaka the Zulu to Ulysses S. Grant. Great warriors of the battlefield and the drawing room demonstrate prudence, agility, balance, and calm. The rational, resourceful, and intuitive always defeat the panicked, uncreative, and stupid. Informed by the most ingenious and effective military principles in war, The 33 Strategies provides all the psychological ammunition you need to overcome patterns of failure and forever gain the upper hand.
The classic, New York Times-bestselling book on the psychology of racism that shows us how to talk about race in America.
Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? How can we get past our reluctance to discuss racial issues?
Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about communicating across racial and ethnic divides and pursuing antiracism. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand dynamics of race and racial inequality in America.
A collection of readings in the readers language of choice
From leading geopolitical expert and technology futurist Jamie Metzl comes a groundbreaking exploration of the many ways genetic-engineering is shaking the core foundations of our lives-sex, war, love, and death.
At the dawn of the genetics revolution, our DNA is becoming as readable, writable, and hackable as our information technology. But as humanity starts retooling our own genetic code, the choices we make today will be the difference between realizing breathtaking advances in human well-being and descending into a dangerous and potentially deadly genetic arms race.
Enter the laboratories where scientists are turning science fiction into reality. Look towards a future where our deepest beliefs, morals, religions, and politics are challenged like never before and the very essence of what it means to be human is at play. When we can engineer our future children, massively extend our lifespans, build life from scratch, and recreate the plant and animal world, should we?
Passionate, provocative, and highly illuminating, Hacking Darwin is the must-listen book about the future of our species for fans of Homo Deus and The Gene.
Nearly everyone is familiar with holograms—three-dimensional images projected into space with the aid of a laser. Two of the world’s most eminent thinkers believe that the universe itself may be a giant hologram, quite literally a kind of image or construct created, at least in part, by the human mind. University of London physicist David Bohm, a protégé of Einstein and one of the world’s most respected quantum physicists, and Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, an architect of our modern understanding of the brain, have developed a remarkable new way of looking at the universe. Their theory explains not only many of the unsolved puzzles of physics but also such mysterious occurrences as telepathy, out-of-body and near-death experiences, lucid dreams, and even religious and mystical experiences, such as feelings of cosmic unity and miraculous healings. Now featuring a foreword by Lynne McTaggart, The Holographic Universe is a landmark work with exciting conclusions that continue to be proven true by today’s most advanced physics, cosmology, and string theory.
The neuroscience of why bad habits are so hard to break—and how evidence-based strategies can help us change our behavior more effectively
We all have habits we’d like to break, but for many of us it can be nearly impossible to do so. There is a good reason for this: the brain is a habit-building machine. In Hard to Break, leading neuroscientist Russell Poldrack provides an engaging and authoritative account of the science of how habits are built in the brain, why they are so hard to break, and how evidence-based strategies may help us change unwanted behaviors.
Hard to Break offers a clear-eyed tour of what neuroscience tells us about habit change and debunks “easy fixes†that aren’t backed by science. It explains how dopamine is essential for building habits and how the battle between habits and intentional goaldirected behaviors reflects a competition between different brain systems. Along the way, we learn how cues trigger habits; why we should make rules, not decisions; how the stimuli of the modern world hijack the brain’s habit machinery and lead to drug abuse and other addictions; and how neuroscience may one day enable us to hack our habits. Shifting from the individual to society, the book also discusses the massive habit changes that will be needed to address the biggest challenges of our time.
Moving beyond the hype to offer a deeper understanding of the biology of habits in the brain, Hard to Break reveals how we might be able to make the changes we desire—and why we should have greater empathy with ourselves and others who struggle to do so.