Monday, December 19, 2022

My lastest recording on Audible

My latest recording for University Press Audiobooks just debuted on Audible today.  What Workers Say: Decades of Struggle and How to Make Real Opportunity Now is by Roberta Eversen. 

"What have jobs really been like for the past 40 years and what do the workers themselves say about them? In What Workers Say, Roberta Iversen shows that for employees in labor market industries—like manufacturing, construction, printing—as well as those in service-producing jobs, like clerical work, healthcare, food service, retail, and automotive—jobs are often discriminatory, are sometimes dangerous and exploitive, and seldom utilize people’s full range of capabilities. Most importantly, they fail to provide any real opportunity for advancement.

What Workers Say takes its cue from Studs Terkel’s Working, as Iversen interviewed more than 1,200 workers to present stories about their labor market jobs since 1980. She puts a human face on the experiences of a broad range of workers indicating what their jobs were and are truly like. Iversen reveals how transformations in the political economy of waged work have shrunk or eliminated opportunity for workers, families, communities, and productivity. What Workers Say also offers an innovative proposal for compensated civil labor that could enable workers, their communities, labor market organizations, and the national infrastructure to actually flourish."

To listen to the sample and/or purchase the book, head to Audible here.


Friday, December 2, 2022

New nonfiction title on Audible

 

My latest recording on Audible was produced by Spoken Realms.  A treatise on free speech:  The Censorship in Boston by Zechariah Chafee, Jr.

'Censorship, entailing the banning of books works on the stage and film, and public speeches, is not new. During the late 1920s in Boston, Massachusetts, it reached a fever pitch. Book banning was prominent but officials in the city also managed to stifle free artistic expression in theatrical productions, and the right to express ideas in a public forum. The bans were often carried out under the law by religious groups, the serving Mayor of Boston, and even the local police. Zechariah Chafee, Jr. was a professor of law at Harvard University and a staunch advocate of the First Amendment. Here he discusses the policies of 1929 in layman's terms and the various methods censors used to 'protect' the public. In addition to literary and artistic ideas, speeches regarding topics such as politics and birth control were affected.

Chafee published this pamphlet with The Civil Liberties Committee of Massachusetts. Years later, Senator Joseph McCarthy denounced Chafee as 'dangerous' in his work to defend free speech. Today, Chafee is considered a scholar on the First Amendment.'

To listen to the sample and/or purchase the recording, head to Audible here.