
Our Moon
How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are
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Narrated by:
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Rebecca Lowman
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By:
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Rebecca Boyle
About this listen
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A riveting feat of science writing that recasts that most familiar of celestial objects into something eerily extraordinary, pivotal to our history, and awesome in the original sense of the word.”—Ed Yong, New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE • A NEW YORKER AND SMITHSONIAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Many of us know that the Moon pulls on our oceans, driving the tides, but did you know that it smells like gunpowder? Or that it was essential to the development of science and religion? Acclaimed journalist Rebecca Boyle takes listeners on a dazzling tour to reveal the intimate role that our 4.51-billion-year-old companion has played in our biological and cultural evolution.
Our Moon’s gravity stabilized Earth’s orbit—and its climate. It drew nutrients to the surface of the primordial ocean, where they fostered the evolution of complex life. The Moon continues to influence animal migration and reproduction, plants’ movements, and, possibly, the flow of the very blood in our veins.
While the Sun helped prehistoric hunters and gatherers mark daily time, early civilizations used the phases of the Moon to count months and years, allowing them to plan farther ahead. Mesopotamian priests recorded the Moon’s position in order to make predictions, and, in the process, created the earliest known empirical, scientific observations. In Our Moon, Boyle introduces us to ancient astronomers and major figures of the scientific revolution, including Johannes Kepler and his influential lunar science fiction.
Our relationship to the Moon changed when Apollo astronauts landed on it in 1969, and it’s about to change again. As governments and billionaires aim to turn a profit from its resources, Rebecca Boyle shows us that the Moon belongs to everybody, and nobody at all.
©2024 Rebecca Boyle (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“I learned more about the Moon by reading this book than I have in a lifetime of study. Replete with fascinating insights into the Moon’s origins and history, but more than that, what it has meant to us, the people of Earth, Our Moon is a must-read for anyone who has looked up at the Moon in wonder.”—Chris Hadfield, astronaut, bestselling author of The Apollo Murders and The Defector
“Epic in scope—and almost poetic in its narrative beauty—Our Moon will change how you think about our planet, the Moon, and ourselves.”—Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish
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By: Vince Houghton
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The World
- A Brief Introduction
- By: Richard Haass
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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The World is designed to provide listeners of any age and experience with the essential background and building blocks they need to make sense of this complicated and interconnected world. It will empower them to manage the flood of daily news. Listeners will become more informed, discerning citizens, better able to arrive at sound, independent judgments. While it is impossible to predict what the next crisis will be or where it will originate, those who listen to The World will have what they need to understand its basics and the principal choices for how to respond.
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Excellent Primer for young adults
- By Howells on 05-24-20
By: Richard Haass
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A Most Remarkable Creature
- The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey
- By: Jonathan Meiburg
- Narrated by: Jonathan Meiburg
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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An enthralling account of a modern voyage of discovery as we meet the clever, social birds of prey called caracaras, which puzzled Darwin, fascinate modern-day falconers, and carry secrets of our planet's deep past in their family history.
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I don't leave reviews often, but . . .
- By Steven L Peck on 06-24-21
By: Jonathan Meiburg
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The Urge
- Our History of Addiction
- By: Carl Erik Fisher
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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As a psychiatrist in training fresh from medical school, Carl Erik Fisher found himself face-to-face with an addiction crisis that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of his condition, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that our society’s current quagmire is only part of a centuries-old struggle to treat addictive behavior.
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Nailed it
- By Paully on 11-23-22
By: Carl Erik Fisher
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Money for Nothing
- The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich
- By: Thomas Levenson
- Narrated by: Dan Bittner
- Length: 12 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In the heart of the Scientific Revolution, when new theories promised to explain the affairs of the universe, Britain was broke, facing a mountain of debt accumulated in war after war it could not afford. But that same Scientific Revolution - the kind of thinking that helped Isaac Newton solve the mysteries of the cosmos - would soon lead clever, if not always scrupulous, men to try to figure a way out of Britain’s financial troubles.
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Financial innovation's first song of the siren.
- By Michael Barnett on 09-06-20
By: Thomas Levenson
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The Walls Have Ears
- The Greatest Intelligence Operation of World War II
- By: Helen Fry
- Narrated by: Jean Gilpin
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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At the outbreak of World War II, MI6 spymaster Thomas Kendrick arrived at the Tower of London to set up a top secret operation: German prisoners' cells were to be bugged and listeners installed behind the walls to record and transcribe their private conversations. This mission proved so effective that it would go on to be set up at three further sites - and provide the Allies with crucial insight into new technology being developed by the Nazis. In this astonishing history, Helen Fry uncovers the inner workings of the bugging operation.
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inresting look into a secret world.
- By Christopher Daniels on 05-22-20
By: Helen Fry
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The Quiet Before
- On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas
- By: Gal Beckerman
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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We tend to think of revolutions as loud: frustrations and demands shouted in the streets. But the ideas fueling them have traditionally been conceived in much quieter spaces, in the small, secluded corners where a vanguard can whisper among themselves, imagine alternate realities, and deliberate about how to achieve their goals. This extraordinary book is a search for those spaces, over centuries and across continents, and a warning that—in a world dominated by social media—they might soon go extinct.
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Thoughtful Survey with No Magic Solutions
- By Haim Watzman on 04-25-22
By: Gal Beckerman
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The Unidentified
- Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained
- By: Colin Dickey
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In a world where rational, scientific explanations are more available than ever, belief in the unprovable and irrational - in fringe - is on the rise: from Atlantis to aliens, from Flat Earth to the Loch Ness monster, the list goes on. It seems the more our maps of the known world get filled in, the more we crave mysterious locations full of strange creatures. Enter Colin Dickey, cultural historian and tour guide of the weird.
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Skeptic's Analysis of Weird America
- By Adrian on 11-23-20
By: Colin Dickey
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Still Life with Bones
- Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains
- By: Alexa Hagerty
- Narrated by: Rose Akroyd
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout Guatemala’s thirty-six-year armed conflict, state forces killed more than two hundred thousand people. Argentina’s military dictatorship disappeared up to thirty thousand people. In the wake of genocidal violence, families of the missing searched for the truth. Young scientists joined their fight against impunity. Gathering evidence in the face of intimidation and death threats, they pioneered the field of forensic exhumation for human rights.
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Disturbing and Hard to Listen To
- By Alain R Gardner on 06-09-23
By: Alexa Hagerty
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Frostbite
- How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves
- By: Nicola Twilley
- Narrated by: Nicola Twilley
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In the developed world, we’ve reaped the benefits of refrigeration for more than a century, but the costs are catching up with us. We’ve eroded our connection to our food and redefined what “fresh” means. More important, refrigeration is one of the leading contributors to climate change. As the developing world races to build a US-style cold chain, Twilley asks: Can we reduce our dependence on refrigeration? Should we?
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Great Intro to the True Value of the 'Cold Chain'
- By Amazon Customer on 08-08-24
By: Nicola Twilley
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A Short History of Humanity
- A New History of Old Europe
- By: Johannes Krause, Thomas Trappe, Caroline Waight - translator
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Johannes Krause is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a brilliant pioneer in the field of archaeogenetics - archaeology augmented by DNA sequencing technology - which has allowed scientists to reconstruct human history reaching back hundreds of thousands of years before recorded time. In this surprising account, Krause and journalist Thomas Trappe rewrite a fascinating chapter of this history, the peopling of Europe, that takes us from the Neanderthals and Denisovans to the present.
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Not a short history of humanity
- By Brent on 05-02-21
By: Johannes Krause, and others
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All That Is Wicked
- A Gilded-Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind
- By: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Narrated by: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Edward Rulloff was a brilliant yet utterly amoral murderer—some have called him a “Victorian-era Hannibal Lecter”—whose crimes spanned decades and whose victims were chosen out of revenge, out of envy, and sometimes out of necessity.
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PLEASE STOP The Politicizing of Everything
- By Anonymous on 10-15-22
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Superior
- The Return of Race Science
- By: Angela Saini
- Narrated by: Hannah Melbourn
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real.
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Lots of great info, underwhelming narrative
- By Amazon Customer on 04-08-21
By: Angela Saini
Beautiful book
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Beautiful historical account of mankind and the moon
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Interesting Reflections
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My first love was the Moon
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interesting and informative
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Our ever present moon
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Made me really enthusiastic about the moon
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Praise our earthy companion!
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Worth a listen
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Interesting overview of the moon
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