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Endless Novelties of Extraordinary Interest
- The Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger and the Birth of Modern Oceanography
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
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Publisher's summary
A gripping tale of exploration aboard H.M.S. Challenger, an expedition that laid the foundations for modern oceanography.
From late 1872 to 1876, H.M.S. Challenger explored the world's oceans. Conducting deep sea soundings, dredging the ocean floor, recording temperatures, observing weather, and collecting biological samples, the expedition laid the foundations for modern oceanography. Following the ship's naturalists and their discoveries, earth scientist Doug Macdougall engagingly tells a story of Victorian-era adventure and ties these early explorations to the growth of modern scientific fields.
In this lively story of adventure, hardship, and humor, Macdougall examines the work of the expedition's scientists, especially the naturalist Henry Moseley, who rigorously categorized the flora and fauna of the islands the ship visited, and the legacy of John Murray, considered the father of modern oceanography. Macdougall explores not just the expedition itself but also the iconic place that H.M.S. Challenger has achieved in the annals of ocean exploration and science.
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Atlantic is a biography of a tremendous space that has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists, and warriors, and continues profoundly to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams. Spanning the ocean's story, from its geological origins to the age of exploration, from World War II battles to today's struggles with pollution and overfishing, Winchester's narrative is epic, intimate, and awe inspiring.
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Starts Better Than it Finishes
- By Ray on 12-18-10
By: Simon Winchester
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Beyond the Known
- How Exploration Created the Modern World and Will Take Us to the Stars
- By: Andrew Rader
- Narrated by: Andrew Rader
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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For the first time in history, the human species has the technology to destroy itself. But having developed that power, humans are also able to leave Earth and voyage into the vastness of space. After millions of years of evolution, we’ve arrived at the point where we can settle other worlds and begin the process of becoming multi-planetary. How did we get here? What does the future hold for us?
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Loved it!
- By Ann Wellington on 11-14-19
By: Andrew Rader
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The Ocean of Life
- The Fate of Man and the Sea
- By: Callum Roberts
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Who can forget the sense of wonder with which they discovered the creatures of the deep? In this vibrant hymn to the sea, Callum Roberts - one of the world’s foremost conservation biologists - leads listeners on a fascinating tour of mankind’s relationship to the sea, from the earliest traces of water on Earth to the oceans as we know them today. In the process, Roberts looks at how the taming of the oceans has shaped human civilization and affected marine life. Like Four Fish and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Ocean of Life takes a long view to tell a story in which each one of us has a role to play.
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Immediate fan of Mr Roberts
- By Anna on 06-25-24
By: Callum Roberts
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The Ice at the End of the World
- An Epic Journey into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future
- By: Jon Gertner
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders, Jon Gertner
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Ice at the End of the World, Jon Gertner explains how Greenland has evolved from one of earth’s last frontiers to its largest scientific laboratory. The history of Greenland’s ice begins with the explorers who arrived here at the turn of the 20th century. Their original goal was to conquer Greenland’s seemingly infinite interior. Yet their efforts eventually gave way to scientists who built lonely encampments out on the ice and began drilling - one mile, two miles down.Their aim was to pull up ice cores that could reveal the deepest mysteries of earth’s past.
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Adventure, Science, Advocacy
- By EM Goodkind on 09-08-19
By: Jon Gertner
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Krakatoa
- The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island of Krakatoa - the name has since become a byword for a cataclysmic disaster - was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly 40,000 people. Beyond the purely physical horrors of an event that has only very recently been properly understood, the eruption changed the world in more ways than could possibly be imagined. Dust swirled round die planet for years, causing temperatures to plummet and sunsets to turn vivid with lurid and unsettling displays of light.
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Great subject, great writing, great voice
- By rwise on 01-26-04
By: Simon Winchester
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Underworld
- The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
- By: Graham Hancock
- Narrated by: Dennis Kleinman
- Length: 31 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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From Graham Hancock, best-selling author of Fingerprints of the Gods, comes a mesmerizing book that takes us on a captivating underwater voyage to find the ruins of a lost civilization that's been hidden for thousands of years beneath the world's oceans. While Graham Hancock is no stranger to stirring up heated controversy among scientific experts, his books and television documentaries have intrigued millions of people around the world and influenced many to rethink their views about the origins of human civilization.
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Fascinating
- By Michael Beeson on 05-13-19
By: Graham Hancock
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The Statues That Walked
- Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island
- By: Terry Hunt, Carl Lipo
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works?
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The "Mystery of Easter Island" remains raveled
- By Diane on 09-14-12
By: Terry Hunt, and others
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Who Discovered America?
- The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas
- By: Gavin Menzies, Ian Hudson
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Greatly expanding on his blockbuster 1421, distinguished historian Gavin Menzies uncovers the complete untold history of how mankind came to the Americas - offering new revelations and a radical rethinking of the accepted historical record in Who Discovered America? The iconoclastic historian's magnum opus, Who Discovered America? calls into question our understanding of how the American continents were settled, shedding new light on the well-known "discoveries" of European explorers, including Christopher Columbus.
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Like reading an appendix
- By D. McCracken on 01-23-15
By: Gavin Menzies, and others
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The Sediments of Time
- My Lifelong Search for the Past
- By: Meave Leakey, Samira Leakey
- Narrated by: Susan Lyons
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Preeminent paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey brings us along on her remarkable journey to reveal the diversity of our early pre-human ancestors and how past climate change drove their evolution. She offers a fresh account of our past, as recent breakthroughs have allowed new analysis of her team’s fossil findings and vastly expanded our understanding of our ancestors. Meave’s own personal story is replete with drama, from thrilling discoveries on the shores of Lake Turkana to run-ins with armed herders and every manner of wildlife, to raising her children....
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Brilliant!
- By tess koffler on 04-07-21
By: Meave Leakey, and others
What listeners say about Endless Novelties of Extraordinary Interest
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- John riley
- 11-23-22
Great book!
It was very educational! Amazing narration! I was reading it for a marine ecology class and got completely engrossed in the historical figures.
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- Eugene Gallagher
- 01-29-22
After a slow start, it's great
I'm an oceanographer, so I was preadapted to like this book. After a very slow start, which perhaps dealt the the author's own research at Scripps, the book was excellent. I wanted more. I particularly liked the sections about John Murray, who could be a character from a Simon Winchester biography. Murray, a Scot, was on Challenger and spent his life editing the dozens of volumes of Challenger Reports. Murray coined the terms oceanographer and oceanography. I would have liked to hear more about the non-geological findings of Challenger. For example, the animals dredged up by Challenger from the abyss not only disproved Forbes azoic theory but documented very high diversity. Dick Fleming (UW) did an excellent job in Sverdrup, Johnson & Fleming's (1942, p 805-809) 'The Oceans,' describing Challenger's faunal data from the deep sea. Seventy years after Challanger, Murray's reports were still the best available. Challenger discovered not only life but relatively high deep-sea diversity. The Challneger collected 26 sediment-dwelling (benthic) individuals at 6250 meters and found 10 species. Hessler & Sanders (1967) & Sanders (1968) 'rediscovered' high diversity in the deep sea 90 years after Challenger, documenting much higher diversity than Challenger. With better samples, the diversity is now known to be comparable to rain forests. Macdougall introduces some of the major problems facing the oceans today, which is important. The narration was excellent.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- subrookie
- 09-05-19
Good but could have been better
I had some struggles with this book. I appreciate the subject matter but it seems like it was written from the perspective of a natural scientist rather than a historian. I would have liked a more linear, journal like approach to the Challenger expedition. This author jumped around a lot and I had trouble keeping interest because of that.
That's not to say I didn't learn anything, I did, but I felt it may have been more interesting had the author told the story from beginning of the voyage to the end. Instead it was more like a string of scientific anecdotes depending on species they were studying.
Full disclosure here I read a lot of books written by Royal Navy officers at sea and they write voyages in a start to finish manor. This is not that kind of book, and why I struggled.
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3 people found this helpful