The Bluest Eye
By Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 7 hours 5 minutes
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.
It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so... Read more »
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition
By Michelle Alexander
Narrated by: Karen Chilton
Length: 16 hours 56 minutes
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexanders The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of... Read more »
A People's History of the United States
1492 to Present
By Howard Zinn
Narrated by: Jeff Zinn
Length: 34 hours 9 minutes
"A wonderful, splendid book--a book that should be ready by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future." --Howard Fast
For much of his life, historian Howard Zinn chronicled American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version taught in schools -- with... Read more »
Frederick Douglass
Prophet of Freedom
By David W. Blight
Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
Length: 36 hours 56 minutes
**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History**
“Extraordinary…a great American biography” (The New Yorker) of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era.
As a young man Frederick Douglass... Read more »
Narrative of the Life Frederick Douglass
An American Slave
By Frederick Douglas
Narrated by: Raymond Hearn
Length: 4 hours 12 minutes
This classic of American literature, a dramatic autobiography of the early life of an American slave, was first published in 1845, when its author had just achieved his freedom. It is a story that shocked the world with its first-hand account of the horrors of slavery. The book was an incredible success. It sold over thirty thousand copies and... Read more »
The Half Has Never Been Told
Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
By Edward E. Baptist
Narrated by: Ron Butler
Length: 19 hours 47 minutes
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... Read more »
Under the Feet of Jesus
By Helena Maria Viramontes
Narrated by: Nancy Ticotin
Length: 4 hours 36 minutes
A moving and powerful novel about the lives of the men, women, and children who endure a second-class existence and labor under dangerous conditions as migrant workers in California’s fields.
“Viramontes depicts this world with sensuous physicality...working firmly in the social-realist vein of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Upton... Read more »
Strangers from a Different Shore
A History of Asian Americans
By Ronald Takaki
Narrated by: David Shih
Length: 24 hours 41 minutes
In an extraordinary blend of narrative history, personal recollection, and oral testimony, the author presents a sweeping history of Asian Americans. He writes of the Chinese who laid tracks for the transcontinental railroad, of plantation laborers in the cane fields of Hawaii, and of "picture brides" marrying strangers in the hope of becoming... Read more »
At America's Gates
Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943
By Erika Lee
Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
Length: 9 hours 32 minutes
With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation... Read more »
No-No Boy
By John Okada & Ruth Ozeki
Narrated by: David Shih
Length: 9 hours 46 minutes
First published in 1956, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment behind them. It was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of Japanese American writers and scholars recognized the novel's importance and popularized it as one of literature's most powerful testaments to the Asian... Read more »
She Came to Slay
The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman
By Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Narrated by: Robin Miles & Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Length: 3 hours 52 minutes
She Came to Slay
“Excellent audio book that tells the heart breaking trials and Harriet Tubman from her early days to her last. She fought all the way to achieve Firefox for some and equally for all.”
Mollie, HearthFire Books and Treats
John Brown, Abolitionist
The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights
By David S. Reynolds
Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
Length: 25 hours 13 minutes
Few historical figures are as intriguing as John Brown, the controversial Abolitionist who used terrorist tactics against slavery and single-handedly changed the course of American history. This brilliant biography of Brown (1800—1859) by the prize-winning critic and cultural biographer David S. Reynolds brings to life the Puritan warrior who... Read more »
Master of the Mountain
Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves
By Henry Wiencek
Narrated by: Brian Holsopple
Length: 11 hours 3 minutes
Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Henry Wiencek’s eloquent, persuasive book—based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson’s papers—opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson’s... Read more »
Hiroshima
By John Hersey
Narrated by: George Guidall
Length: 5 hours 23 minutes
On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This book, John Hersey's journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. Told through the memories of survivors, this timeless, powerful and compassionate document has become a classic "that stirs the conscience of humanity" (The New York... Read more »
Hiroshima Diary
The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6-September 30, 1945
By Michihiko Hachiya, MD
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
Length: 8 hours 52 minutes
The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. Dr. Hachiya's compelling diary was... Read more »
There There
A novel
By Tommy Orange
Narrated by: Darrell Dennis, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Alma Cuervo & Kyla Garcia
Length: 7 hours 59 minutes
There There
“Heartbreaking and necessary, this book is raw, powerful, and storytelling at its finest. It's a woven tapestry of the urban Indian experience as few outside these communities have seen it. Vignettes follow 12 people through time and space as they make their way to the Big Oakland Powwow. Each person has their own struggles with identity, life, the powwow; with living, loving, addiction, and employment; with heart and soul and happiness and everything else that makes up the complicated human story, but most especially the complex Indian experience in America. This debut novel was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. ”
BrocheAroe, River Dog Book Co.
The Fire Next Time
By James Baldwin
Narrated by: Jesse Martin
Length: 2 hours 25 minutes
At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement with his eloquent manifesto. The Fire Next Time stands as one of the essential works of our... Read more »
Homegoing
A novel
By Yaa Gyasi
Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
Length: 13 hours 10 minutes
Homegoing
“Homegoing is an epic narrative that is sure to become a treasured staple. Two sisters in Ghana are marked by fiery tragedy: one is married off to an English slave trader, and the other is sold to be a slave in America. The story follows their descendants generation by generation. Homegoing will break your heart over and over, impress you with the resilience of the human spirit and the amazing power of forgiveness, and leave you optimistic and in awe.”
Nichole McCown, Bookshop Santa Cruz
I Can't Breathe
A Killing on Bay Street
By Matt Taibbi
Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
Length: 12 hours 49 minutes
A work of riveting literary journalism that explores the roots and repercussions of the infamous killing of Eric Garner by the New York City police—from the bestselling author of The Divide
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST
On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten... Read more »
Kill Anything That Moves
The Real American War in Vietnam
By Nick Turse
Narrated by: Don Lee
Length: 8 hours 49 minutes
Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were “isolated incidents” in the Vietnam War, carried out by a few “bad apples.” However, as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this pioneering investigation, violence against Vietnamese civilians was not at all exceptional. Rather,... Read more »