Social Tests

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger is a timely and thoughtful exploration into the history of women’s anger and oppression, the revolutions it has led to, as well as the current momentum all of those things in the wake of Donald Trump’s election...Rebecca Traister offers not only a guide for navigating your own anger in a system that was meant to suppress it, but also a guide to the history of feminism, oppression, and social justice movements from abolitions and women's suffrage to the tides of political change today.

Author Michael Pollan digs through decades of research and plays human guinea pig to illustrate the potential of psychedelics to alter the mind. Please note: This is a summary and analysis of the book and not the original book. If you'd like to purchase the original book, it is available from Amazon and Audible.

This is an audio summary of Bob's Woodward's best-selling book that explores the detailed inner workings of Trump's highly unorthodox, and often toxic, White House. It is intended as a companion to, not a replacement for, the original book.

In their best-selling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explore the culture of fragility and safetyism that has invaded American universities since 2013 and the underlying causes behind it. (Disclaimer: This is NOT the original book. If you’re looking for the original book, it is available from Amazon and Audible.)

Steven Pinker wants to prove that we are living in a world that is better off than it has ever been, and it will only continue to get better. In Enlightenment Now, Pinker argues that the best tools we have come from the 18th century ideals of reason, science, progress, and humanism, and we can leverage them in very 21st century ways by using data to tell the story of our modern world. (Disclaimer: This is NOT the original book. If you’re looking for the original book, it is available from Amazon and Audible.)

This audio summary contains key takeaways of the original book A Higher Loyalty by James Comey. It summarizes the book in detail to help people effectively understand, articulate, and imbibe the original work.

Politics is one of the first books ever to investigate the concept of political philosophy. Written by the famous Greek thinker Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, it focuses on trying to understand how best to create political communities that support, serve, and improve their citizens. Aristotle investigates a number of different areas before drawing conclusions. These include an examination of existing regimes to see which are best, a look at political theories, and even an exploration of the systems of education.

After World War II ended in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began a decades-long confrontation that would become known as the Cold War. American foreign policy focused on "containment" - preventing the communist USSR from gaining more ground - and many people looked at the geographical and political implications of this policy. Others, meanwhile, explored American domestic life in that same period. But historian Elaine Tyler May became the first person to bring these seemingly unrelated areas together.

Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a key text in the development of what we now know as feminism. Written in the atmosphere created by the French Revolution, which made radical change seem possible, Wollstonecraft's work challenges the idea that society's oppression of women is entirely natural. While her male contemporaries happily argued for the fundamental freedoms of all men, few were interested in extending these revolutionary rights to women.

Max Weber was the first to identify beliefs and practices that influenced economic behavior. He found Catholics generally less motivated to succeed in business than Protestants because of their religious belief that everyone could achieve salvation. The branch of Protestants known as Calvinists, on the other hand, believed God determined everyone's salvation status before birth. Nothing a person might do on earth could save a soul marked for damnation.

Social anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard wrote Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande after 20 months' fieldwork with the Azande people of the South Sudan. It became the founding text in the anthropology of witchcraft, and has been hailed as a classic. Although Witchcraft had little impact when it first appeared in 1937, its popularity grew after World War II. Alongside his subsequent work on the Nuer people, Witchcraft established Evans-Pritchard's reputation as an important anthropologist.

With its convenient format, AudioLearn fits your busy lifestyle, enabling you to study anywhere, anytime. Best of all, you'll significantly increase learning and retention with AudioLearn's proven study format.

American sociologist and priest Jay MacLeod's 1987 work Ain't No Makin' It is groundbreaking for the novel way it combines field research with theory. The book follows the lives of two groups of young men from a low-income housing project in the greater Boston area. In it, MacLeod shows how poor people who aspire to live the American dream face many more obstacles than their middle-class counterparts.

Linguistic structuralism studies the meaning of language based not just on definitions, but also on the relationships of words and sounds to each other. Lévi-Strauss's insight was to see that this concept of structuralism in linguistics could be applied to anthropology as well. He saw that while some cultures are very different from others, they all seem to have certain internal structural relationships in common. By tracing these structures across cultures, he tried to answer nothing less than the eternal question: "What is man?"

In his 1996 book The Clash Of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, American political scientist Samuel Huntington sets out his vision of the post-Cold War world. While the era from 1945 to 1989 was shaped by ideological conflict (communism vs. capitalism), Huntington predicts a future of cultural conflict.

How do those in power exercise that power over a state's citizens? French thinker Michel Foucault's 1975 work Discipline and Punish looks to answer this question by investigating the prison system. Foucault does not believe that the modern-day system developed out of reformers' humanitarian concerns. He argues that prison both created and then became part of a bigger system of surveillance that extends throughout society.

Published in 1996, Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large is an edited collection of earlier essays that had already made the Indian-born anthropologist an influential figure in his field of cultural anthropology. Appadurai here presents a theory of globalization, and suggests ways that other researchers can follow up on his ideas. Many of them continue to do so. For anthropologists, the book offered new ways of thinking about how communities are affected by globalization.

First published in Germany in 1980, British historian Ian Kershaw's The "Hitler Myth" is recognized as one of the most important books ever written about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi State. Kershaw wanted to focus on what he called the "history of everyday life", and so investigated the attitude of the German public to Hitler at the time, rather than looking at the dictator from the perspective of those in positions of power. He was intrigued to find out how someone like Hitler could have become such a powerful figure.

In her original and controversial 2005 book Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject Saba Mahmood examines the women's mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt as part of a wider turn to religious fervor integral to the broader Islamic revival of the twenty-first century. Mahmood's research suggests that in choosing to embrace the norms of their faith, these pious Muslim women are not limiting, but rather affirming, themselves.

Published by sociologist and historian W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903, this series of essays addresses the plight of African Americans facing everyday racism in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. It has become one of the most important works on race and identity across the world. Du Bois sets out to explain how black interaction with a white world has caused psychological anguish and argues that blacks should demand total equality in their daily realities.