
Energy
A Human History
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Narrated by:
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Jacques Roy
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By:
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Richard Rhodes
About this listen
Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Richard Rhodes reveals the fascinating history behind energy transitions over time - wood to coal to oil to electricity and beyond.
People have lived and died, businesses have prospered and failed, and nations have risen to world power and declined, all over energy challenges. Ultimately, the history of these challenges tells the story of humanity itself.
Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.
In Energy, Rhodes highlights the successes and failures that led to each breakthrough in energy production, from animal and water power to the steam engine, from internal combustion to the electric motor. He addresses how we learned from such challenges, mastered their transitions, and capitalized on their opportunities. Rhodes also looks at the current energy landscape, with a focus on how wind energy is competing for dominance with cast supplies of coal and natural gas. He also addresses the specter of global warming and a population hurtling toward 10 billion by 2100.
Human beings have confronted the problem of how to draw life from raw material since the beginning of time. Each invention, each discovery, each adaptation brought further challenges, and through such transformations we arrived at where we are today. In Rhodes’ singular style, Energy details how this knowledge of our history can inform our way tomorrow.
©2018 Richard Rhodes (P)2018 Simon & Schuster AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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By: Richard Rhodes
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- Length: 15 hrs and 48 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The world is being shaken by the collision of energy, climate change, and the clashing power of nations in a time of global crisis. The "shale revolution" in oil and gas - made possible by fracking technology, but not without controversy - has transformed the American economy, ending the "era of shortage", but introducing a turbulent new era. Almost overnight, the United States has become the world's number one energy powerhouse - and, during the coronavirus crisis, brokered a tense truce between Russia and Saudi Arabia.
-
-
Not his best: Overly broad, kind of sloppy
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By: Daniel Yergin
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TEDIOUS - slow, dry, monotone delivery
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Great book. Atrocious robot narration.
- By Ted on 07-11-19
By: James Mahaffey
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The Quest
- Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
- By: Daniel Yergin
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 29 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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A master storyteller as well as a leading energy expert, Daniel Yergin continues the riveting story begun in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Prize. In The Quest, Yergin shows us how energy is an engine of global political and economic change and conflict, in a story that spans the energies on which our civilization has been built and the new energies that are competing to replace them. The Quest tells the inside stories, tackles the tough questions, and reveals surprising insights about coal, electricity, and natural gas.
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Best nonfiction book of 2011
- By Joshua Kim on 05-06-12
By: Daniel Yergin
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The Science of Energy
- Resources and Power Explained
- By: Michael E. Wysession, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Michael E. Wysession
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Original Recording
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To better put into perspective the various issues surrounding energy in the 21st century, you need to understand the essential science behind how energy works. And you need a reliable source whose focus is on giving you the facts you need to form your own educated opinions.
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Great Overview
- By Amanda Gannon on 04-07-16
By: Michael E. Wysession, and others
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The War Below
- Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives
- By: Ernest Scheyder
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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The War Below reveals the explosive brawl among industry titans, conservationists, community groups, policymakers, and many others over whether the habitats of rare plants, sensitive ecosystems, Indigenous holy sites, and other places should be dug up for their riches.
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Misses its chance at greatness
- By B L on 09-16-24
By: Ernest Scheyder
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Shorting the Grid
- The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid
- By: Meredith Angwin
- Narrated by: Eric G. Meyer
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Grid insiders know how fragile the grid is becoming. Unfortunately, they have no incentive to solve the problem because near-misses increase their profits. Meredith Angwin describes how closed meetings, arcane auction rules, and five-minute planning horizons will topple the reliability of our electric grid. Shorting the Grid shines light on the vulnerabilities of our grid, and includes suggestions for making the grid more dependable.
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Very Informative, But Desperately Needs A pdf
- By Richard Redano on 12-27-22
By: Meredith Angwin
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Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy
- By: Gwyneth Cravens
- Narrated by: Christine Williams
- Length: 16 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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With the constant threat of oil shortages facing us and wanting to educate herself about possible alternatives, Gwyneth Cravens skeptically sets out to find for herself the truth about nuclear energy. Her conclusion: It is a totally viable and practical solution to global warming. She enlists the help of Rip Anderson, a leading scientist in the field of risk assessment, and with his tutelage, she travels the country, visiting uranium mines, enrichment centers, reactors, and waste sites.
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Debunking Nuclear Superstition
- By Doug on 09-11-12
By: Gwyneth Cravens
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California Burning
- The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric—and What It Means for America's Power Grid
- By: Katherine Blunt
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Pacific Gas and Electric was a legacy company built by innovators and visionaries, establishing California as a desirable home and economic powerhouse. In California Burning, Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer finalist Katherine Blunt examines how that legacy fell apart—unraveling a long history of deadly failures in which Pacific Gas and Electric endangered millions of Northern Californians, through criminal neglect of its infrastructure.
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Best book I've read this year.
- By Constance L. Gehrt on 10-21-23
By: Katherine Blunt
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Hell and Good Company
- The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made
- By: Richard Rhodes
- Narrated by: Christian Coulson
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) inspired and haunted an extraordinary number of exceptional artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and John Dos Passos. The idealism of the cause--defending democracy from fascism at a time when Europe was darkening toward another world war--and the brutality of the conflict drew from them some of their best work.
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Awkward approach to a civil war
- By sabas on 01-17-17
By: Richard Rhodes
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John James Audubon
- The Making of an American
- By: Richard Rhodes
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 21 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes comes the first major biography of John James Audubon in forty years and the first to illuminate fully the private and family life of the master illustrator of the natural world.
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Excellent narration
- By Johnathan Matthew Ward on 09-10-24
By: Richard Rhodes
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Hedy's Folly
- The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World
- By: Richard Rhodes
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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What do Hedy Lamarr, avant-garde composer George Antheil, and your cell phone have in common? The answer is spread-spectrum radio: a revolutionary invention based on the rapid switching of communications signals among a spread of different frequencies. Without this technology, we would not have the digital comforts that we take for granted today. Only a writer of Richard Rhodes’s caliber could do justice to this remarkable story. Unhappily married to a Nazi arms dealer, Lamarr fled to America at the start of World War II; she brought with her not only her theatrical talent....
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Like a 1930s People Magazine
- By Home Hunter 808 on 12-24-15
By: Richard Rhodes
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A Question of Power
- Electricity and the Wealth of Nations
- By: Robert Bryce
- Narrated by: Robert Bryce
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Global demand for power is doubling every two decades, but electricity remains one of the most difficult forms of energy to supply and do so reliably. Today, some three billion people live in places where per-capita electricity use is less than what's used by an average American refrigerator. How we close the colossal gap between the electricity rich and the electricity poor will determine our success in addressing issues like women's rights, inequality, and climate change.
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Not the complete story
- By John on 08-11-20
By: Robert Bryce
Amazing
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I cannot finish due to the accents
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Mr Rhodes obviously knows a lot about nuclear power (he wrote The Making of the Atomic Bomb, an excellent book), but I think he would have been a better advocate for rehabilitating the nuclear industry, and would have written a better book, by making rational arguments instead of engaging in amateur psychology and conspiracy theory.
Goes Off The Rails At The End
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great but incomplete
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The book itself is great. I urge Audible to produce a new version without the difficult to understand and distracting accents.
Love the book. Hate the narration
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400 years of energy supporting human society .
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As for the accents, I thought they were pretty well done and spiced up the narration a bit. I was more irked by his pronunciation of giga- and Willamette, but, overall, I thought it was professional and well done.
Encyclopedic in scope
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Good with it continued
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But it is a good book!
No more accents, please!
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Nicely presented story but poor performance
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