Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Social Sciences

In July 2012, aged 30, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery and felt for the first time that her body matched the person she felt she had been since childhood. Through university and then in a series of dead end clerical jobs, Jacques felt out of place with her surroundings, and with who she really was. Living in Brighton, trying to launch a career as a writer, she navigates the hostilities and misunderstandings of growing up in a time when the mainstream media - and even feminism - fail to acknowledge transgender identity.

Obesity has hit epidemic levels. In the developed, and much of the developing world, it is now 'normal' to be overweight with a BMI of 25 or more. And the global population is getting fatter all the time as a powerful mix of cheap foods, social behaviours, and commercial pressures drives us to the biscuit tin again and again and again. But this is not the worst of it....

In 1930, William Haines was Hollywood's #1 box-office draw - a talented, handsome, and wisecracking romantic lead. Off screen, however, protected by a careful collaboration between studio and press, he was openly gay with reporters and studio chiefs alike. Here is Haines's virtually unknown story - rich with detail, revelations, and scandal - about silent movies and talkies; his lover Jimmie Shields, and their fifty-year relationship.

British prisoners have to endure the most inhumane and barbaric conditions imaginable, so why do so many of them keep going back? Former inmate and documentary maker Chris Atkins has spent the last six years tracking the fortunes of a dozen repeat offenders to understand why the state fails to keep them out of trouble. Featuring funny, wild and poignant stories, Time After Time exploits Chris's unprecedented access to the criminal underworld to understand why the system actually makes reoffending all but inevitable for ex prisoners.

Without a moment's pause, we share our most intimate thoughts with trillion-dollar tech companies. Their algorithms categorise us and jump to conclusions about who we are. They even shape our everyday thoughts and actions—from who we date to how we vote. But this is just the latest front in an age-old struggle. Part history and part manifesto, Freedom to Think charts the history and importance of our most basic human right: freedom of thought.

More than one-fifth of children want to become influencers, and it's easy to understand why. What if you could escape economic uncertainty by winning the internet's attention? What if you could turn the adoration of your social media followers into a lucrative livelihood? But as Symeon Brown explores in this searing exposé, the reality is much murkier. From IRL streamers in LA to Brazilian butt lifts, from sex workers on OnlyFans to fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes, these are the incredible stories that lurk behind the filtered selfies and gleaming smiles.

When confronted with an ethical dilemma, most of us like to think we would stand up for our principles. But we are not as ethical as we think we are. In Blind Spots, leading business ethicists Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel examine the ways we overestimate our ability to do what is right and how we act unethically without meaning to.

Taken from George Armstrong Custer's own writings, An Autobiography of General Custer is the “true story” of one of the most praised, most despised, but surely most remembered American military heroes. Indeed, few figures in our history were - in their own time, as well as in our own - so wildly cheered and so roundly hated.

In The Problem with Rich Women, Gloria Steinem explores how and why feminism failed to reach women in powerful families, and provides an urgent and persuasive argument for rebellion among upper-class women.

Queen of Thieves is the gritty, fast-paced story of Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum, a poor Jewish woman who rose to the top of her profession in organized crime during the Gilded Age in New York City. During her more than twenty-five-year reign as the country’s top receiver of stolen goods, she accumulated great wealth and power inconceivable for women engaged in business, legitimate or otherwise.

Learn the inside scoop on Watergate, the Ford Pardon, and the 18-minute Gap. Roger Stone, The New York Times best-selling author of The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, gives the inside scoop on Nixon’s rise and fall in Watergate in his new book Nixon’s Secrets. Stone charts Nixon’s rise from election to Congress in 1946 to the White House in 1968 after his razor-thin loss to John Kennedy in 1960, his disastrous campaign for Governor of California in 1962, and the greatest comeback in American Presidential history.

What if you weren't sexually attracted to anyone? A growing number of people are identifying as asexual. They aren't sexually attracted to anyone, and they consider it a sexual orientation - like gay, straight, or bisexual. Asexuality is the invisible orientation. Most people believe that "everyone" wants sex, that "everyone" understands what it means to be attracted to other people, and that "everyone" wants to date and mate. But that's where asexual people are left out - they don't find other people sexually attractive, and if and when they say so, they are very rarely treated as though that's okay.

While millions face hunger, malnutrition, and starvation, the world's population is increasing by over 225,000 people per day, 80 million per year. In many countries, supplies of food and water are inadequate to support the population, so the world falls deeper and deeper into what economists call the "Malthusian trap". Here, Malthus examines the tendency of human numbers to outstrip their resources, and argues that poverty, disease, and starvation are necessary to keep societies from moving beyond their means of subsistence.

The Frighteners follows the quest of Peter Laws, a Baptist minister with a penchant for the macabre, to understand why so many people love things that are spooky, morbid and downright repellent. He meets vampires, hunts werewolves in Hull, talks to a man who has slept on a mortuary slab to help him deal with a diagnosis, and is chased by a chainsaw-wielding maniac through a farmhouse full of hanging bodies.

Transitions of the Heart is the first collection to ever invite mothers of transgender and gender variant children of all ages to tell their own stories about their child’s gender transition. Often transitioning socially and emotionally alongside their child but rarely given a voice in the experience, mothers hold the key to familial and societal understanding of gender difference.

With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.

In a direct, frank, and intimate exploration of Iranian literature and society, scholar, teacher, and poet Fatemeh Keshavarz challenges popular perceptions of Iran as a society bereft of vitality and joy. Her fresh perspective on present-day Iran provides a rare insight into this rich culture alive with artistic expression but virtually unknown to most Americans. Blending in firsthand glimpses of her own life from childhood memories in 1960s Shiraz to her present life as a professor in America, Keshavarz paints a portrait of Iran depicting both cultural depth and intellectual complexity.

In 1951 George Jorgensen, an American man of 26, left for Denmark and returned a year later as the first world-renowned transsexual, Christine Jorgensen. In her own personable style, Jorgensen offers a firsthand account of her ground-breaking life. "Nature made a mistake," she wrote, "which I have corrected."

In Scarborough, a low-income urban neighborhood, three kids struggle to rise above poverty, abuse, and a system that consistently fails them. The adults in their lives either rise to the occasion or fall by the wayside; together, they make up a troubled yet inspired community that refuses to be undone.

With intolerance and inequality increasingly normalised by the day, it's more important than ever for women to share their experiences. We must hold the truth to account in the midst of sensationalism and international political turmoil. Nasty Women is a collection of essays, interviews and accounts on what it is to be a woman in the 21st century. People, politics, pressure, punk. Keep telling your stories.