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Impossible Monsters
- Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion
- Narrated by: Michael Langan
- Length: 15 hrs
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Publisher's summary
"Vivid with a Mesozoic bestiary" (Tom Holland), this on-the-ground, must-listen narrative weaves together the chance discovery of dinosaurs and the rise of the secular age.
When the twelve-year-old daughter of a British carpenter pulled some strange-looking bones from the country's southern shoreline in 1811, few people dared to question that the Bible told the accurate history of the world. But Mary Anning had in fact discovered the "first" ichthyosaur, and over the next seventy-five years—as the science of paleontology developed, as Charles Darwin posited radical new theories of evolutionary biology, and as scholars began to identify the internal inconsistencies of the Scriptures—everything changed. Beginning with the archbishop who dated the creation of the world to 6 p.m. on October 22, 4004 BC, and told through the lives of the nineteenth-century men and women who found and argued about these seemingly impossible, history-rewriting fossils, Impossible Monsters reveals the central role of dinosaurs and their discovery in toppling traditional religious authority, and in changing perceptions about the Bible, history, and mankind's place in the world.
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Every Living Thing
- The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
- By: Jason Roberts
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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?
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Fascinating history of scientific thought
- By Candy Dan on 06-10-24
By: Jason Roberts
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How the World Made the West
- A 4,000 Year History
- By: Josephine Quinn
- Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
- Length: 15 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the “civilizational thinking” regarding the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe, to name just a few examples.
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just a Chronicle of events and times.
- By Placeholder on 10-19-24
By: Josephine Quinn
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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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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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Wonderful, expansive and up-to-date.
- By David on 09-09-24
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Why War?
- By: Richard Overy
- Narrated by: Dennis Kleinman
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Why has war been such a consistent presence throughout the human past? A leading historian explains, drawing on rich examples and keen insight. Richard Overy is not the first scholar to take up the title question. In 1931, at the request of the League of Nations, Albert Einstein asked Sigmund Freud to collaborate on a short work examining whether there was "a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war." Published the next year as a pamphlet entitled Why War?, it conveyed Freud's conclusion that the "death drive" made any deliverance impossible.
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Encyclopedic style, lots of analysis
- By Tyler on 10-20-24
By: Richard Overy
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A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks
- By: David Gibbins
- Narrated by: Kent Klineman
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Since we first set sail on the open sea, ships and their wrecks have been an inevitable part of human history. Archaeologists have made spectacular discoveries excavating these sunken ships, their protective underwater cocoon keeping evidence of past civilizations preserved. World renowned maritime archeologist David Gibbins ties together the stories of some of the most significant shipwrecks in time to form a single overarching narrative of world history.
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Not recommend
- By Richard F. Callahan on 04-11-24
By: David Gibbins
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Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party
- How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World
- By: Edward Dolnick
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads us through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today. The tale begins with Mary Anning, a poor, uneducated woman who had a sixth sense for finding fossils buried deep inside cliffs; and moves to a brilliant, eccentric geologist named William Buckland.
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Wonderful narration of an awesome history
- By BB on 09-26-24
By: Edward Dolnick
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Every Living Thing
- The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
- By: Jason Roberts
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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?
-
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Fascinating history of scientific thought
- By Candy Dan on 06-10-24
By: Jason Roberts
-
How the World Made the West
- A 4,000 Year History
- By: Josephine Quinn
- Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
- Length: 15 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the “civilizational thinking” regarding the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe, to name just a few examples.
-
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just a Chronicle of events and times.
- By Placeholder on 10-19-24
By: Josephine Quinn
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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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Wonderful, expansive and up-to-date.
- By David on 09-09-24
-
Why War?
- By: Richard Overy
- Narrated by: Dennis Kleinman
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why has war been such a consistent presence throughout the human past? A leading historian explains, drawing on rich examples and keen insight. Richard Overy is not the first scholar to take up the title question. In 1931, at the request of the League of Nations, Albert Einstein asked Sigmund Freud to collaborate on a short work examining whether there was "a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war." Published the next year as a pamphlet entitled Why War?, it conveyed Freud's conclusion that the "death drive" made any deliverance impossible.
-
-
Encyclopedic style, lots of analysis
- By Tyler on 10-20-24
By: Richard Overy
-
A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks
- By: David Gibbins
- Narrated by: Kent Klineman
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Since we first set sail on the open sea, ships and their wrecks have been an inevitable part of human history. Archaeologists have made spectacular discoveries excavating these sunken ships, their protective underwater cocoon keeping evidence of past civilizations preserved. World renowned maritime archeologist David Gibbins ties together the stories of some of the most significant shipwrecks in time to form a single overarching narrative of world history.
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Not recommend
- By Richard F. Callahan on 04-11-24
By: David Gibbins
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The Writing of the Gods
- The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone
- By: Edward Dolnick
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous objects in the world, attracting millions of visitors to the British museum every year, and yet most people don’t really know what it is. Discovered in a pile of rubble in 1799, this slab of stone proved to be the key to unlocking a lost language that baffled scholars for centuries.
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Hieroglyphs For The People
- By Spike on 01-15-22
By: Edward Dolnick
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Raiders, Rulers, and Traders
- The Horse and the Rise of Empires
- By: David Chaffetz
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance.
By: David Chaffetz
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Mosquito Warrior
- Yellow Fever, Public Health, and the Forgotten Career of General William C. Gorgas
- By: Carol R. Byerly
- Narrated by: Holly Adams
- Length: 14 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Mosquito Warrior tells the engrossing story of General William C. Gorgas (1854-1920), the once-renowned pioneer in tropical disease research and public health. His fascinating life illuminates vast transformations in the United States. Carol R. Byerly's balanced and contemporary examination of Gorgas illuminates his complex legacy in medicine and public health, military history, and American ambitions at the dawn of United States global ascendency.
By: Carol R. Byerly
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Medieval Horizons
- Why the Middle Ages Matter
- By: Ian Mortimer
- Narrated by: Ian Mortimer
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward, and unchanging time characterized by violence, ignorance, and superstition. By contrast, we believe progress arose from science and technological innovation, and that inventions of recent centuries created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong.
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Altered my perception of History
- By IowaGreyhound on 06-25-24
By: Ian Mortimer
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Everest, Inc.
- The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World
- By: Will Cockrell
- Narrated by: Pete Simonelli
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Anyone who has heard of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air or has seen a recent photo of climbers standing in line to get to the top of Everest may think they have a sense of what the world’s highest mountain is like. It’s an extreme landscape where bad weather and incredible altitude can kill; an overcrowded, trashed-out recreation destination; and a place where the rich exploit local Sherpas while padding their egos—and social media feeds.
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Only if you are an avid mountaineer
- By Love books on 05-04-24
By: Will Cockrell
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The Clockwork Universe
- Isaac Newton, The Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World
- By: Edward Dolnick
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
The Clockwork Universe is the story of a band of men who lived in a world of dirt and disease but pictured a universe that ran like a perfect machine. A meld of history and science, this book is a group portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled with natures most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still hold the key to how we understand the world.
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Calculus Ergo Modernity
- By Nelson Alexander on 07-09-11
By: Edward Dolnick
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Life Lessons from a Parasite
- What Tapeworms, Flukes, Lice, and Roundworms Can Teach Us About Humanity's Most Difficult Problems
- By: John Janovy Jr.
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Though you may not be able to see them with the naked eye, parasites inhabit our everyday lives. From headlice to bird droppings, litterboxes to unfiltered water, you have brushed up against the most common way of life on our planet. In this unique book, John Janovy Jr., one of the world's preeminent experts on parasites, reveals what can humans learn from the most reviled yet misunderstood animals on Earth: lice, tapeworms, flukes, and maggots that can eat a lizard from the inside, and how these lessons help us negotiate our own complicated world.
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Disappointed in double agenda.
- By Michael S Derry Jr on 09-17-24
By: John Janovy Jr.
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A Hell of a Storm
- The Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War
- By: David S. Brown
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In A Hell of a Storm, Brown brings history to life in a way that resonates with the events of present. Through chapters on Lincoln, Emerson, Stowe, Thoreau, and Tubman, along with a cast of presidents, poets, abolitionists, and black emigrationists, Brown weaves a political, cultural, and literary history that chronicles the Republican party’s creation and rise, the collapse of antebellum compromises, and the coming of the Civil War, all topics that mirror current discussions about polarization in our nation today.
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No narrative
- By JFG on 10-07-24
By: David S. Brown
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The Saigon Guns
- A True Story of Aerial Combat in the Fall of 1972
- By: John Thomas Hoffman
- Narrated by: Shawn Compton
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The remaining US aviation forces, along with the US Air Force and US Navy and Marine aviation assets, would not be easily removed from the battle. For the US forces still in-country, this is an untold story of heroism, dedication, and refusal to yield the battlefield despite being largely considered by US political leaders as "expendable."
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Unsettled, Updated and Expanded Edition
- What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters
- By: Steven E. Koonin
- Narrated by: Jay Aaseng
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
With the new edition of Unsettled, Steven Koonin draws on decades of experience—including as a top science advisor to the Obama administration—to clear away the fog and explain what science really says (and doesn’t say). With a new introduction, this edition now features reflections on an additional three years of eye-opening data, alternatives to unrealistic “net zero” solutions, global energy inequalities, and the energy crisis arising from the war in Ukraine.
By: Steven E. Koonin
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Bite
- An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans
- By: Bill Schutt
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Bite, zoologist Bill Schutt makes a surprising case: it is teeth that are responsible for the long-term success of vertebrates. The appearance of teeth, roughly half a billion years ago, was an adaptation that allowed animals with backbones, such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, dinosaurs and mammals—including us—to chow down in pretty much every conceivable environment.
By: Bill Schutt
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Evolutionary Intelligence
- How Technology Will Make Us Smarter
- By: W. Russell Neuman
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is natural for us to fear artificial intelligence. But does Siri really want to kill us? Perhaps we are falling into the trap of projecting human traits onto the machines we might build. In Evolutionary Intelligence, Neuman offers a surprisingly positive vision in which computational intelligence compensates for the well-recognized limits of human judgment, improves decision making, and actually increases our agency. Neuman takes the listener on an exciting, fast-paced ride, all the while making a convincing case about a revolution in computationally augmented human intelligence.
What listeners say about Impossible Monsters
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Gram1950
- 09-18-24
Interesting but Slow
The narrator was annoying and had this habit of reading every quote in a breathy whisper. I finally listened at faster than normal speed and found that better. The book does effectively take you back to a time when people actually believed Bishop Usher. Scientists who were mostly dilettantes had a terrible time reconciling their discoveries with what everyone knew was true. As the science became harder to deny people had to rearrange their world view. It does make an interesting story.
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- Leslie RP
- 08-17-24
Interesting
I liked this book, it gave me more insights into to history of dinosaurs and the people and the science of the study of dinosaurs.
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- Michael
- 09-09-24
Repetitive and not that interesting
Just didn’t get much out of this . Felt like each new scientist they explored was basically the same point being made again and again.
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1 person found this helpful