Silk
A World History
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Narrated by:
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Hannah Curtis
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By:
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Aarathi Prasad
About this listen
A Next Big Idea Book Club Must-Read for April
“Aarathi Prasad’s Silk: A World History is a love song to this protean material. . . . Beautiful [and] fascinating.”—Wall Street Journal
"Aarathi Prasad spins a masterpiece of a story, as luminous, supple, and surprising as the wondrous threads themselves."—Sy Montgomery, bestselling author of The Soul of an Octopus and Of Time and Turtles
Throughout history, across cultures and countries, silk has reigned as the undeniable queen of fabrics, yet its origins and evolution remain a mystery. In a gorgeous and sweeping narrative, Silk weaves together its intricate story and the indelible mark it has left on humanity.
Some four thousand years ago, the cultivation of silkworms began, the practice spreading to the far reaches of civilization. With it came a growing obsession with unlocking silk’s secrets to understand how the strongest biological material ever known could be harnessed.
Explorers and scientists, including groundbreaking women who pushed the boundaries of societal expectations, dedicated—even sacrificed—their lives to investigate the anatomy of silk-producing animals. They endured unbelievable hardships to discover and collect new specimens, leading them to the moths of China, Indonesia, and India; the spiders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Madagascar; and the mollusks of the Mediterranean.
Rich with the complex connections between human and nonhuman worlds, Silk not only peers into the past but also reveals the fiber’s impact today, inspiring new technologies across the fashion, military, and medical fields, and shows its untapped potential to pioneer a more sustainable future.
The culmination of author and biologist Aarathi Prasad’s own lifelong passion and grounded in years of research and writing, Silk is an intoxicating listen that provides an essential illumination of nature’s most glamourous thread.
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By: Eric Berger
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Inspired
- How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, Second Edition
- By: Marty Cagan
- Narrated by: Marty Cagan
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
How do today's most successful tech companies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla - design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently from the vast majority of tech companies. In Inspired, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides listeners with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love.
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Great book, terrible audio wanted to ask a refund
- By Srikanth Ramanujam on 11-15-18
By: Marty Cagan
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The Butchering Art
- Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
- By: Lindsey Fitzharris
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters - no place for the squeamish - and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. They were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. A young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister would solve the deadly riddle and change the course of history.
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Not one boring moment!
- By WRWF on 12-22-17
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Cosmic Queries
- StarTalk’s Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going
- By: James Trefil, Lindsey N. Walker - editor, Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Narrated by: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lauren Fortgang
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this illuminating audiobook, Tyson and coauthor James Trefil, a renowned physicist and science popularizer, take on the big questions that humanity has been posing for millennia - How did life begin? What is our place in the universe? Are we alone? - and provide answers based on the most current data, observations, and theories.
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Not worth it
- By Daniel Earl on 03-15-21
By: James Trefil, and others
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Ranger Confidential
- Living, Working, and Dying in the National Parks
- By: Andrea Lankford
- Narrated by: Julia Motyka
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The real stories behind the scenery of America’s national parks. For 12 years, Andrea Lankford lived in the biggest, most impressive national parks in the world, working a job she loved. She chaperoned baby sea turtles on their journey to sea. She pursued bad guys on her galloping patrol horse. She jumped into rescue helicopters bound for the heart of the Grand Canyon. She won arguments with bears. She slept with a few too many rattlesnakes. Hell yeah, it was the best job in the world! Fortunately, Andrea survived it.
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Depressing from Cover to Cover
- By Drew (@drewsant) on 04-13-15
By: Andrea Lankford
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Just as good as her other books
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A Perfect Red recounts the colorful history of cochineal, a legendary red dye that was once one of the world's most precious commodities. Treasured by the ancient Mexicans, cochineal was sold in the great Aztec marketplaces, where it attracted the attention of the Spanish conquistadors in 1519. Shipped to Europe, the dye created a sensation, producing the brightest, strongest red the world had ever seen. Soon Spain's cochineal monopoly was worth a fortune. Desperate to find their own sources of the elusive dye, the English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans tried to crack the enigma of cochineal.
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History of a peculiar substance through the ages
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Color
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In this vivid and captivating journey through the colors of an artist’s palette, Victoria Finlay takes us on an enthralling adventure around the world and through the ages, illuminating how the colors we choose to value have determined the history of culture itself. Color is full of extraordinary people, events, and anecdotes—painted all the more dazzling by Finlay’s engaging style. The colors that craft our world have never looked so bright.
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Dress Codes
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For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status.
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Unlistenable
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Women's Work
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Twenty thousand years ago, women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers. In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women. Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture.
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Respectful treatment of the archeological record.
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The Golden Thread
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- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
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From colorful 30,000-year-old threads found on the floor of a Georgian cave to the Indian calicoes that sparked the Industrial Revolution, The Golden Thread weaves an illuminating story of human ingenuity. Design journalist Kassia St. Clair guides us through the technological advancements and cultural customs that would redefine human civilization - from the fabric that allowed mankind to achieve extraordinary things (traverse the oceans and shatter athletic records) and survive in unlikely places (outer space and the South Pole).
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Excellent for those interested in textiles
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By: Kassia St. Clair
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Threads of Life
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Overall
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From the political propaganda of the Bayeux Tapestry, World War I soldiers coping with PTSD, and the maps sewn by schoolgirls in the New World, to the AIDS quilt, Hmong story clothes, and pink pussyhats, women and men have used the language of sewing to make their voices heard, even in the most desperate of circumstances. Threads of Life is a chronicle of identity, protest, memory, power, and politics told through the stories of needlework.
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Textile bucket list.
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Becoming Earth
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One of humanity’s oldest beliefs is that our world is alive. Though once ridiculed by some scientists, the idea of Earth as a vast interconnected living system has gained acceptance in recent decades. We, and all living things, are more than inhabitants of Earth—we are Earth, an outgrowth of its structure and an engine of its evolution. Life and its environment have coevolved for billions of years, transforming a lump of orbiting rock into a cosmic oasis—a planet that breathes, metabolizes, and regulates its climate.
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Fascinating and well researched
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A Stash of One's Own
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- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In tales from 21 knitters, Clara Parkes examines a subject that is irresistible to us all: the yarn stash. Anyone with a passion has a stash, whether it is a collection of books or enough yarn to exceed several life expectancies. With her trademark wry, witty approach, Parkes brings together fascinating stories from all facets of stash-keeping and knitting life - from KonMari minimalist to joyous collector, designer to dyer, spinner to social worker, scholar to sheep farmer.
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Another Delightful Read From Clara Parkes
- By Aly on 03-10-18
By: Clara Parkes
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The Dancing Goddesses
- By: Elizabeth Wayland Barber
- Narrated by: Julia Farhat
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From southern Greece to northern Russia, people have long believed in female spirits, bringers of fertility, who spend their nights and days dancing in the fields and forests. So appealing were these spirit-maidens that they also took up residence in 19th-century Romantic literature. Archaeologist and linguist by profession, folk dancer by avocation, Elizabeth Wayland Barber has sleuthed through ethnographic lore and archaeological reports of east and southeast Europe, translating enchanting folktales about these "dancing goddesses" as well as eyewitness accounts of traditional rituals - texts that offer new perspectives on dance in agrarian society.
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Terrible narration
- By ECNB on 11-07-20
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Pat in the City
- My Life of Fashion, Style, and Breaking All the Rules
- By: Patricia Field
- Narrated by: Eliza Foss
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Carrie Bradshaw’s pairing of a tutu with a tank top is one of the most iconic outfits ever seen on television—and a look that turned avant-garde New York designer and stylist Patricia Field into a household name. But before she was crowned the fairy godmother of haute couture, Field was the owner of the longtime East Village emporium Pat Field, a haven for drag queens, club kids, starving artists, NYU freshmen, and creative visionaries alike.
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More in Love w/ her
- By Keshia Tanay on 04-24-24
By: Patricia Field
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Only the Clothes on Her Back
- Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States
- By: Laura F. Edwards
- Narrated by: Stephanie Richardson
- Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Only the Clothes on Her Back uncovers practices, commonly known then, but now long forgotten, which made textiles - clothing, cloth, bedding, and accessories, such as shoes and hats - a unique form of property that people without rights could own and exchange. The value of textiles depended on law, and it was law that turned these goods into a secure form of property for marginalized people, who not only used these textiles as currency, credit, and capital, but also as entree into the new republic's economy and governing institutions.
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Buy the book
- By Susan on 12-29-22
By: Laura F. Edwards