The Landscape of History
How Historians Map the Past
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Narrated by:
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Jack Chekijian
About this listen
What is history, and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today. Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians represent what they can never replicate. In doing so, they combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Their approaches parallel, in intriguing ways, the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality. They don't much resemble what happens in the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning with static systems seems increasingly divorced from the world as we know it. So who's really being scientific, and who isn't? This question, too, is one Gaddis explores in ways that are certain to spark interdisciplinary controversy.
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- By Daegan Smith on 04-06-15
By: Addy Pross
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The Big Picture
- On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
- By: Sean Carroll
- Narrated by: Sean Carroll
- Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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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 King of Infinite Space
- Euclid and His Elements
- By: David Berlinski
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 3 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Geometry defines the world around us, helping us make sense of everything from architecture to military science to fashion. And for over 2,000 years, geometry has been equated with Euclid's Elements, arguably the most influential book in the history of mathematics. In The King of Infinite Space, renowned mathematics writer David Berlinski provides a concise homage to this elusive mathematician and his staggering achievements.
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Funniest Highest and Fullest math overview
- By Francisco Garcia on 12-12-22
By: David Berlinski
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Mind and Cosmos
- Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
- By: Thomas Nagel
- Narrated by: Brian Troxell
- Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete.
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Intellectual honesty at its finest
- By Alice Walker on 02-15-18
By: Thomas Nagel
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Breaking the Spell
- Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why - and how - it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a moral life? Ranging through biology, history, and psychology, Daniel C. Dennett charts religion’s evolution from “wild” folk belief to “domesticated” dogma.
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Great Reader Actually Enhances A Great Book!
- By Don Caliente on 07-14-14
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A Brief History of Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable
- Brief Histories
- By: Brian Clegg
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.' Douglas Adams, Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.We human beings have trouble with infinity - yet infinity is a surprisingly human subject. Philosophers and mathematicians have gone mad contemplating its nature and complexity - yet it is a concept routinely used by schoolchildren. Exploring the infinite is a
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Really not great in Audio, not great otherwise
- By Michael on 03-29-13
By: Brian Clegg
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Orientalism
- By: Edward Said
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 19 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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This landmark book, first published in 1978, remains one of the most influential books in the Social Sciences, particularly Ethnic Studies and Postcolonialism. Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism", which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism Said claimed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."
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We're lucky to have this on audio
- By Delano on 02-27-13
By: Edward Said
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A Beginner’s Guide to Reality
- Exploring Our Everyday Adventures in Wonderland
- By: Jim Baggott
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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A unique fusion of philosophy and metaphysics set against the backdrop of contemporary culture. Have you ever wondered if the world is really there when you're not looking? We tend to take the reality of our world very much for granted. This book will lead you down the rabbit hole in search of something we can point to, hang our hats on, and say this is real.
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A real great listen on the nature of reality
- By Patrick Mabry, Jr. on 07-30-14
By: Jim Baggott
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Interesting, but fails to offer real lessons.
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Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the "design intuition" - the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can be accomplished only by someone who has that knowledge.
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The only other review was so bad that I wrote this
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In 1945, the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong, 5,000 nuclear-tipped missiles, and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward, the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the 20th century.
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The Social Construction of Reality
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Called the "fifth-most important sociological book of the 20th century" by the International Sociological Association, this groundbreaking study of knowledge introduces the concept of "social construction" into the social sciences for the first time. In it, Berger and Luckmann reformulate the task of the sociological subdiscipline that, since Max Scheler, has been known as the sociology of knowledge.
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Overwhelming the first listen
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By: Peter L. Berger, and others
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The Battle for Spain
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Antony Beevor has written a completely updated and revised account of one of the most bitter and hard-fought wars of the 20th century. With new material gleaned from Russian archives and numerous other sources, this brisk and accessible audiobook (Spain's number-one best seller for 12 weeks) provides a balanced and penetrating perspective, explaining the tensions that led to this terrible overture to World War II and affording new insights into the war - its causes, course, and consequences.
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Not an Accurate History Book
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What listeners say about The Landscape of History
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- Gregory A Bailey
- 01-25-24
Thought provoking and deep
What a great listen on the facets and factors impacting history and in fact considerations a historian should reflect on in their craft. Almost philosophical. Wonderfully entertaining. I want to listen to it again!
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- E. Clark
- 09-11-21
Dichotomy at its finest
Definitely a book to trigger your "thinking" senses forcing you to think outside the box. A must read for any history buff or aspiring historian.
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- Birding_Bubba
- 09-30-21
Good book, meh Narration
Difficult to get through. Monotone narration of a fascinating topic. I would read the book again.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Alexander
- 09-02-17
Absolutely fascinating book!
Absolutely fascinating book! Completely changed my mental construct of history and how to apply it to my view of the present. Very well articulated and at times forced me question my beliefs on the use of history to explain the present. He draws on his wealth of knowledge to explain how professors /or students of history can scale and portray the functions of history. Recommend this book to anyone looking to see history in a different light or at least reinforce their belief in the importance of history.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Billy
- 09-15-18
Excellent Book!
This book is great for the person entering the field of historical study. Gaddis’ metaphors are accessible and varied. Even where it is outside your normal field—say the metaphor comes from astrophysics—Gaddis manages to make it seem simplistic.
The only qualm is the narration. It’s slow. Too slow. I kicked the speed up to 1.25x and that made it seem closer to a normal audiobook speed.
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3 people found this helpful
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- GW
- 01-20-24
Great narrator
Apart from the book being a gem, the narration is outstanding in its own right.
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- Luke Bishop
- 02-15-22
I fell asleep many times
narration is very monotone and author is hard to understand most of the time. this was a required book for a history class and it was very hard to follow
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- Mitchell Loyd Farris
- 11-10-20
Too much fluff
There is undoubtedly some good information in here, but it is buried among a load of nonsense. The writer seemingly uses every metaphor known to man. Most of the metaphors he uses don't even make sense in the context they are used. Then there is a lot of what seems to me like filler. I feel like he inserted a bunch of bigs words and pointless stories to make a word count. This book could have been better if was stripped down to its bare bones without all of the pomp and fluff. The narrator is extremely boring and delivers the message poorly too. This could have hurt the message the book was trying to send too. I nearly fell asleep driving listening to him. I had to speed it up to 2x normal speed just to listen to him. Pass on this one unless you a required to read it.
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1 person found this helpful