
A Place for Everything
The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
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Narrated by:
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Julia Winwood
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By:
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Judith Flanders
About this listen
From a New York Times best-selling historian comes the story of how the alphabet ordered our world.
A Place for Everything is the first-ever history of alphabetization, from the Library of Alexandria to Wikipedia. The story of alphabetical order has been shaped by some of history's most compelling characters, such as industrious and enthusiastic early adopter Samuel Pepys and dedicated alphabet champion Denis Diderot. But though even George Washington was a proponent, many others stuck to older forms of classification - Yale listed its students by their family's social status until 1886. And yet, while the order of the alphabet now rules - libraries, phone books, reference books, even the order of entry for the teams at the Olympic Games - it has remained curiously invisible.
With abundant inquisitiveness and wry humor, historian Judith Flanders traces the triumph of alphabetical order and offers a compendium of Western knowledge, from A to Z.
©2020 Judith Flanders (P)2020 Basic BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
A Times (UK) Best Book of 2020
"Surprising and copiously researched." (Times Literary Supplement)
"Quirky and compelling.... [Flanders] is a meticulous historian with a taste for the offbeat; the story of alphabetical order suits her well." (Dan Jones, Sunday Times, UK)
"For readers who love language or armchair historians interested in the evolution of linguistics, this is catnip. For the mildly curious, it's accessible, narratively adventurous, and surprisingly insightful about how the alphabet marks us all in some way.... A rich cultural and linguistic history." (Kirkus)
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Performance
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“It's not a diet, it's a lifestyle.” You've probably heard this phrase from any number of people in the wellness space. But as Christy Harrison reveals in her latest book, wellness culture promotes a standard of health that is often both unattainable and deeply harmful. The Wellness Trap delves into the persistent, systemic problems with that industry, offering insight into its troubling pattern of cultural appropriation and its destructive views on mental health, and shedding light on how a growing distrust of conventional medicine has led ordinary people to turn their backs on science.
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Missed the Mark
- By Kelly on 05-04-23
By: Christy Harrison
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Knowing What We Know
- The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classes—this is Simon Winchester’s brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans acquire, retain, and pass on information and data, and how technology continues to change our lives and our minds. Throughout this fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder what rational humans are becoming. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of thought? What is information without wisdom?
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Colorful anecdotes but tiring after a while.
- By Thumb Guy on 05-03-23
By: Simon Winchester
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Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World
- A History
- By: William Alexander
- Narrated by: Paul Bellantoni
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Supported by meticulous research and told in a lively, accessible voice, Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World seamlessly weaves travel, history, humor, and a little adventure (and misadventure) to follow the tomato's trail through history. A fascinating story complete with heroes, con artists, conquistadors, and—no surprise—the Mafia, this book is a mouth-watering, informative, and entertaining guide to the food that has captured our hearts for generations.
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Interesting history of tomatoes
- By Amazon Customer on 03-17-25
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Homer and His Iliad
- By: Robin Lane Fox
- Narrated by: Steve John Shepherd
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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The Iliad is the world’s greatest epic poem—heroic battle and divine fate set against the Trojan War. Its beauty and profound bleakness are intensely moving, but great questions remain: Where, how, and when was it composed and why does it endure? Robin Lane Fox addresses these questions, drawing on a lifelong love and engagement with the poem. He argues for a place, a date, and a method for its composition—subjects of ongoing controversy—combining the detailed expertise of a historian with a poetic reader’s sensitivity.
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Masterful!
- By J. C. Weaver on 01-08-24
By: Robin Lane Fox
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RedHanded
- An Exploration of Criminals, Cannibals, Cults, and What Makes a Killer Tick
- By: Suruthi Bala, Hannah Maguire
- Narrated by: Suruthi Bala, Hannah Maguire, Denise Mina
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Based off Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala's popular podcast of the same name, RedHanded explores real-life true-crime cases to help answer once and for all if a killer is born or made.
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Deeply investigated, full of light
- By Amy Castenell on 10-08-21
By: Suruthi Bala, and others
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Eat, Poop, Die
- How Animals Make Our World
- By: Joe Roman PhD
- Narrated by: Claire Christie
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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If forests are the lungs of the planet, then animals migrating across oceans, streams, and mountains—eating, pooping, and dying along the way—are its heart and arteries, pumping nitrogen and phosphorus from deep-sea gorges up to mountain peaks, from the Arctic to the Caribbean. Without this conveyor belt of crucial, life-sustaining nutrients, the world would look very different.
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Excellent!
- By Lee on 07-20-24
By: Joe Roman PhD
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Disrupted
- My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
- By: Dan Lyons
- Narrated by: Dan Lyons
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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An instant New York Times best seller, Dan Lyons' "hysterical" (Recode) memoir, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "the best book about Silicon Valley," takes listeners inside the maddening world of fad-chasing venture capitalists, sales bros, social climbers, and sociopaths at today's tech startups. For 25 years Dan Lyons was a magazine writer at the top of his profession - until one Friday morning when he received a phone call: Poof. His job no longer existed. "I think they just want to hire younger people," his boss at Newsweek told him.
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Don't drink the Kool Aid
- By Margaret on 07-03-16
By: Dan Lyons
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Normal Family
- On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings
- By: Chrysta Bilton
- Narrated by: Chrysta Bilton
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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What is a “normal family,” and how do you go about making one? Chrysta Bilton’s magnetic, larger-than-life mother, Debra, yearned to have a child, but as a single gay woman in 1980s California, she had few options. Until one day, while getting her hair done in a Beverly Hills salon, she met a man and instantly knew he was the one she’d been looking for. Beautiful, athletic, artistic, and from a well-to-do family, Jeffrey Harrison appeared to be Debra’s ideal sperm donor.
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Absorbing, literary memoir, best of the genre
- By Sue Kasdon on 07-20-22
By: Chrysta Bilton
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You Don't Belong Here
- How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War
- By: Elizabeth Becker
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine, and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations.
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Good book for Vietnam buffs
- By Penelopatty on 03-27-21
By: Elizabeth Becker
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Self-Made
- Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians
- By: Tara Isabella Burton
- Narrated by: Patricia Santomasso
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In a technologically-saturated era where nearly everything can be effortlessly and digitally reproduced, we're all hungry to carve out our own unique personalities, our own bespoke personae, to stand out and be seen. As the forces of social media and capitalism collide, and individualism becomes more important than ever across a wide array of industries, "branding ourselves" or actively defining our selves for others has become the norm. Yet, this phenomenon is not new. In Self-Made, Tara Isabella Burton shows us how we arrived at this moment of fervent personal-branding.
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Not to the same standard as T.I.B’s other books.
- By A. on 11-23-24
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The Self Delusion
- The New Neuroscience of How We Invent—and Reinvent—Our Identities
- By: Gregory Berns
- Narrated by: Byron Wagner
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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We all know we tell stories about ourselves. But as psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns argues in The Self Delusion, we don’t just tell stories; we are the stories. Our self-identities are fleeting phenomena, continually reborn as our conscious minds receive, filter, or act on incoming information from the world and our memories.
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Fun & fascinating facts on shaping oneself
- By Lucy A. Pithecus on 10-24-22
By: Gregory Berns
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Retail Gangster
- The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie
- By: Gary Weiss
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Back in the fall of 2016, we heard the news about the passing of Eddie Antar, "Crazy Eddie" as he was known to millions of people, the man behind the successful chain of electronic stores and one of the most iconic ad campaigns in history. Few things evoke the New York of a particular era the way "Crazy Eddie! His prices are insaaaaane!" does. The journalist Herb Greenberg called his death the "end of an era" and that couldn't be more true. What's insane is that his story has never been told.
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Great Story, Long Listen
- By Bridget on 03-26-23
By: Gary Weiss
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Briarheart
- By: Mercedes Lackey
- Narrated by: Polly Lee
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Miriam may be the daughter of Queen Alethia of Tirendell, but she's not a princess. She's the child of Alethia and her previous husband, the King's Champion, who died fighting for the king, and she has no ambitions to rule. When her new baby sister, Aurora, heir to the throne, is born, she's ecstatic. She adores the baby, who seems perfect in every way. But on the day of Aurora's christening, an uninvited Dark Fae arrives, prepared to curse her, and Miriam discovers she possesses impossible power.
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Huge Lackey fan, this did not satisfy
- By GratefulHeartist on 12-18-21
By: Mercedes Lackey
Like ordering things?
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Very interesting
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Interesting and enjoyable.
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interesting but admittedly dry
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You have to love library science
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