
Every Living Thing
The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
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Narrated by:
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David de Vries
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By:
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Jason Roberts
About this listen
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • An epic, extraordinary account of scientific rivalry and obsession in the quest to survey all of life on Earth—a competition “with continued repercussions for Western views of race. [This] vivid double biography is a passionate corrective” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice).
“[A] vibrant scientific saga . . . at once important, outrageous, enlightening, entertaining, enduring, and still evolving.”—Dava Sobel, author of Longitude
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species—or as many could fit on Noah’s Ark?
Both fell far short of their goal, but in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, the future of the Earth, and humanity itself. Linnaeus gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate, and Homo sapiens, but he also denied that species change and he promulgated racist pseudoscience. Buffon formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, warned of global climate change, and argued passionately against prejudice. The clash of their conflicting worldviews continued well after their deaths, as their successors contended for dominance in the emerging science that came to be called biology.
In Every Living Thing, Jason Roberts weaves a sweeping, unforgettable narrative spell, exploring the intertwined lives and legacies of Linnaeus and Buffon—as well as the groundbreaking, often fatal adventures of their acolytes—to trace an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.
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“A fluent and engaging account of the 18th-century origins of Darwinism before Darwin.”—The Wall Street Journal
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Story
Charles Freeman, lauded historical scholar and author of The Closing of the Western Mind (“A triumph”—The Times), explores the rebirth of Western thought in the centuries that followed the demise of the classical era. As the dominance of Christian teachings gradually subsided over time, a new open-mindedness made way for the ideas of morality and theology, and fueled and formed the backbone of the Western mind of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond.
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Fascinating survey of 1,000+ years of thought
- By Roger on 11-07-23
By: Charles Freeman
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How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch
- In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang
- By: Harry Cliff
- Narrated by: Harry Cliff
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Harry Cliff - a University of Cambridge particle physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider - sets out in pursuit of answers. He ventures to the largest underground research facility in the world, deep beneath Italy's Gran Sasso mountains, where scientists gaze into the heart of the Sun using the most elusive of particles, the ghostly neutrino. He visits CERN in Switzerland to explore the "Antimatter Factory," where the stuff of science fiction is manufactured daily (and we're close to knowing whether it falls up).
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Excellent
- By Adrian on 01-06-23
By: Harry Cliff
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Papyrus
- The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
- By: Irene Vallejo, Charlotte Whittle - translator
- Narrated by: Sophie Roberts
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Long before books were mass-produced, hand-copied scrolls made from Nile River reeds were the treasures of the ancient world. Emperors and pharaohs, determined to possess them, dispatched emissaries to the edges of the known world to bring them back. Exploring the deep and fascinating history of the written word, from the oral tradition to scrolls to codices, internationally bestselling author Irene Vallejo shows that books have always been a precious and precarious vehicle for civilization.
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Great read
- By Hunter Pechin on 12-15-22
By: Irene Vallejo, and others
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Storm in a Teacup
- The Physics of Everyday Life
- By: Helen Czerski
- Narrated by: Chloe Massey
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In Storm in a Teacup, Helen Czerski provides the tools to alter the way we see everything around us by linking ordinary objects and occurrences, like popcorn popping, coffee stains, and fridge magnets, to big ideas like climate change, the energy crisis, and innovative medical testing.
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Everyday Physics Thoroughly Explained
- By Amazon Customer on 01-19-17
By: Helen Czerski
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The Manuscripts Club
- The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts
- By: Christopher de Hamel
- Narrated by: John Lee, Christopher de Hamel
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. However, we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to whom they owe their existence. This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years.
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Manuscripts Through the Centuries
- By Tbaley on 12-02-23
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The Deep History of Ourselves
- The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains
- By: Joseph LeDoux
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This pause-resisting survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human. In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms.
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Oversold
- By Michael on 03-04-20
By: Joseph LeDoux
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Water
- A Biography
- By: Giulio Boccaletti
- Narrated by: Giulio Boccaletti
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning millennia and continents, here is a stunningly revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization. Giulio Boccaletti - honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford - shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers.
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Understand Built-Environment Governance~Know Water
- By Tom on 05-11-22
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Otherlands
- A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds
- By: Thomas Halliday
- Narrated by: Adetomiwa Edun
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life.
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Great book brilliantly read
- By Dipam on 04-06-22
By: Thomas Halliday
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The World in Books
- 52 Works of Great Short Nonfiction
- By: Kenneth C. Davis
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo, Leon Nixon, Kenneth C. Davis
- Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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A bestselling historian takes listeners on an intellectual and cultural adventure, offering a carefully curated guide to great, short nonfiction works by some of the world’s most influential writers—from Plato to Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway to bell hooks, and Marcus Aurelius to Joan Didion. A delightful roadmap to a year’s worth of reading briefly, plus biographies, fascinating facts, and idea-rich insights into the lives of the thinkers, historians, and literary giants who have shaped our world.
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An enticing, concise overview.
- By Sean Faircloth on 11-10-24
By: Kenneth C. Davis
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The Horse
- A Galloping History of Humanity
- By: Timothy C. Winegard
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 19 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Timothy C. Winegard’s The Horse is an epic history unlike any other. Its story begins more than 5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe; when one human tamed one horse, an unbreakable bond was forged and the future of humanity was instantly rewritten, placing the reins of destiny firmly in human hands. Since that pivotal day, the horse has carried the history of civilizations on its powerful back.
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Virtue signaling on 4 legs
- By K N on 08-25-24
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Science in the Soul
- Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
- By: Richard Dawkins
- Narrated by: Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward, Gillian Somerscales
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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For decades Richard Dawkins has been the world's most brilliant scientific communicator, consistently illuminating the wonders of nature and attacking faulty logic. Science in the Soul brings together 42 essays, polemics, and paeans - culled from personal papers, newspapers, lectures, and online salons - all written with Dawkins' characteristic erudition, remorseless wit, and unjaded awe of the natural world.
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Great writing; distracting reading
- By Chris DeMuth Jr on 08-09-17
By: Richard Dawkins
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Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test
- How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters
- By: Marlene Zuk
- Narrated by: Jaime Lamchick
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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For centuries, people have been returning to the same tired nature-versus-nurture debate, trying to determine what we learn and what we inherit. In Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, biologist Marlene Zuk goes beyond the binary and instead focuses on interaction, or the way that genes and environment work together. Driving her investigation is a simple but essential question: How does behavior evolve?
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Good information, but reader distracts from it.
- By Jeremy Proctor on 02-13-23
By: Marlene Zuk
Fascinating history of scientific thought
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