
Merchants of Doubt
How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
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Narrated by:
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Liza Seneca
About this listen
Bloomsbury presents Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway, read by Liza Seneca.
Featuring a new Foreword by former Vice President Al Gore
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
"Important and timely. We ignore this message at our peril."—Elizabeth Kolbert
Merchants of Doubt has been praised—and attacked—around the world, for reasons easy to understand. This book tells, with “brutal clarity” (Huffington Post), the disquieting story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. The same individuals who claim the science of global warming is “not settled” have also denied the truth about studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. “Doubt is our product,” wrote one tobacco executive. These “experts” supplied it. Merchants of Doubt rolls back the rug on this dark corner of American science. Now with a new Foreword by former Vice President Al Gore, and with a new Postscript by the authors.
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Story
Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on the Higgs boson and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions. Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void?
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ABSOLUTE MUST READ!
- By serine on 05-12-16
By: Sean Carroll
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The Wealth of Nations
- By: Adam Smith
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 36 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The foundation for all modern economic thought and political economy, The Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of Scottish economist Adam Smith, who introduces the world to the very idea of economics and capitalism in the modern sense of the words.
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ADAM SMITH
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 01-20-15
By: Adam Smith
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Zero to One
- Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
- By: Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
- Narrated by: Blake Masters
- Length: 4 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.
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Seems Insightful Until You Think A Little Deeper
- By Mark Brandon on 10-31-14
By: Peter Thiel, and others
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The Misinformation Age
- How False Beliefs Spread
- By: Cailin O’Connor, James Owen Weatherall
- Narrated by: Chelsea Stephens
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what's essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively.
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Veritas!
- By Charles Henderson on 08-11-20
By: Cailin O’Connor, and others
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A World Lit Only by Fire
- The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age
- By: William Manchester
- Narrated by: Barrett Whitener
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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From tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of trial by ordeal, no era has been a greater source of awe, horror, and wonder than the Middle Ages. In handsomely crafted prose and with the grace and authority of his extraordinary gift for narrative history, William Manchester leads us from a civilization tottering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth, the Renaissance.
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Ruined by the narrator
- By Wallen on 02-28-09
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The Capitalist Manifesto
- Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World
- By: Johan Norberg
- Narrated by: Mark Elstob
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Marx and Engels were right when they observed in the Communist Manifesto that free markets had in a short time created greater prosperity and more technological innovation than all previous generations combined. A century and a half later, all the evidence shows that capitalism has lifted millions and millions from hunger and poverty. Today's story about global capitalism, shared by right-wing and left-wing populists, but also by large sections of the political and economic establishment, does not deny that prosperity has been created, but it says it ended up in far too few hands.
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An unknown perspective
- By Salman Syed on 01-15-24
By: Johan Norberg
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Screw Business as Usual
- By: Richard Branson
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Richard Branson, one of the world's most famous and admired business leaders, argues that it's time to turn capitalism upside down - to shift our values from an exclusive focus on profit to also caring for people, communities, and the planet as he writes: "People often associate me with challenges, with trying to break records while sailing the Atlantic or flying in a jet stream in a balloon or going into space with Virgin Galactic. But this audiobook isn't just about fun and adventure and exceeding one's wildest dreams."
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Self aggrandizing garbage
- By Brian on 06-27-17
By: Richard Branson
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This Changes Everything
- Capitalism vs. the Climate
- By: Naomi Klein
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 20 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies.
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Didactic and preachy... and I agree with her
- By plau on 09-25-16
By: Naomi Klein
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Manufacturing Consent
- The Political Economy of the Mass Media
- By: Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 15 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In this pathbreaking work, now with a new introduction, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.
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Eye opening
- By EFM on 03-24-18
By: Edward S. Herman, and others
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Survival of the Richest
- Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
- By: Douglas Rushkoff
- Narrated by: Douglas Rushkoff
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, AI futurism, and the metaverse. In a dozen urgent, electrifying chapters, he confronts tech utopianism, the datafication of all human interaction, and the exploitation of that data by corporations. Through fascinating characters, Rushkoff explains why those with the most power to change our current trajectory have no interest in doing so.
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It promises much and delivers too little.
- By jim on 12-28-22
By: Douglas Rushkoff
Clash of economic and political interests with science
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Urgency to act
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I’m sorry the impact of smoking on heart disease was only touched on tangentially. From my perspective that was the greatest social cost of smoking.
Thoughtful presentation of economic interests restraining public health advances.
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heroic
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I loved it, and have been recommending it to everyone, I really do think it’s a must-read.
Eye Opening Read
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Required reading for every informed citizen
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All I can say is we need revolt
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Careful historical history research demonstrating a pattern
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Not about events of the 21st century
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Exhausting...too long
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