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When We Cease to Understand the World
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
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Publisher's summary
When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger - these are some of the luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the listener, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
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One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
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What in the heck happened?????
- By Melinda on 02-05-14
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Figuring
- By: Maria Popova
- Narrated by: Natascha McElhone
- Length: 21 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries - beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement.
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Stunning
- By Laura on 03-12-19
By: Maria Popova
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The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
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The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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The Mind Parasites
- The Supernatural, Metaphysical Cult Thriller
- By: Colin Wilson
- Narrated by: Raphael Corkhill
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Wilson has blended H. P. Lovecraft's dark vision with his own revolutionary philosophy and unique narrative powers to produce a stunning, high-tension story of vaulting imagination. A professor makes a horrifying discovery while excavating a sinister archaeological site. For over 200 years, mind parasites have been lurking in the deepest layers of human consciousness, feeding on human life force and steadily gaining a foothold on the planet. Now they threaten humanity's extinction.
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wow
- By Esmeralda on 09-26-18
By: Colin Wilson
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The Ancestor
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It feels like a fairy tale when Alberta ”Bert” Monte receives a letter addressed to “Countess Alberta Montebianco” at her Hudson Valley, New York, home that claims she’s inherited a noble title, money, and a castle in Italy. While Bert is more than a little skeptical, the mystery of her aristocratic family’s past, and the chance to escape her stressful life for a luxury holiday in Italy, is too good to pass up.
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Provocative but potential unrealized
- By Natasha Darling on 06-06-20
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Spring and All: Facsimile Edition
- New Directions Pearls
- By: William Carlos Williams
- Narrated by: Sean Slater
- Length: 1 hr and 47 mins
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A beautiful facsimile of the 1923 original edition which is considered "one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century" by The New York Times. Spring and All is a manifesto of the imagination - a hybrid of alternating sections of prose and free verse that coalesce in dramatic, energetic, and beautifully cryptic statements of how language re-creates the world. Spring and All contains some of Williams' best-known poetry.
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Classic!
- By Amazon Customer on 01-25-18
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The Sum of Our Days
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory - and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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She does not disappoint
- By ChiChi's Rule on 06-01-22
By: Isabel Allende
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Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
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Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
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Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
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He Held Radical Light
- The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art
- By: Christian Wiman
- Narrated by: John Lescault
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Christian Wiman explores the relationships between art and faith, death and fame, heaven and oblivion. Above all, He Held Radical Light is a love letter to poetry, filled with moving, surprising, and sometimes funny encounters with the poets Wiman has known.
By: Christian Wiman
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Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality.
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What listeners say about When We Cease to Understand the World
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Joshua Miller
- 02-27-22
A new insight into mad genius
I throughly enjoyed the individual portraits of prominent scientists from the last century. The author neatly tied together the several lives he featured by tethering to them common themes so it felt as though they overlapped in time and space.
What I would have really appreciated would be integrating more scientists outside of quantum physics that helped further the understanding of astronomy, chemistry, geology, and computer science but with similar ties between them. And feature more than a select few of German scientists. I understand that was the hotbed of quantum theory, but he could have broaden his list of included scientists to show just how radical the few really were.
Overall, it was a fantastic but limited perspective. Yet I will likely listen to it again in the future for another impression.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Paul W. Galetto
- 04-08-22
Titillating
The author did an admirable job of taking extraordinarily complex concepts and putting them in a layperson’s understanding. I found the details unnecessarily titillating; the description of private thoughts and actions made me doubt the veracity of the narrative.
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- BealeFarange
- 09-01-24
Quantum Physics for Poets
A great book read well. This was fun and terrifying all at once, a fantastic mix of fact and fiction that helped this lit major better understand some of science’s toughest concepts.
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- J_H
- 08-27-24
Fascinating content
The storytelling was captivating and kept me listening. I stopped a few times due to various reasons but certainly not because the story was boring.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-02-22
Incredible
An incredible read: elaborate in its structure, disturbing in its subject, and daunting in its scope. A series of stories that straddle the line between fact and fiction as the reader is left to ponder their own understanding of the world.
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3 people found this helpful
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- benk
- 10-01-22
Fake non-fiction
Reads like non-fiction history of science, and most of it is, but can’t tell which parts are fictionalized
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3 people found this helpful
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- Dwight Casey
- 01-29-24
My son told me to read this. I did not know it was fiction until I was almost finished. Fascinating story.
This book will really make you think. There are times when it’s hard to follow. But you will be glad you did at the end.
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- alicia
- 05-13-23
Intriguing
This book continued to draw me back in over and over- I couldn’t stop listening and actually looked forward to my commute. I found the content wildly interesting, and thoroughly enjoyed the storytelling perspective of a complex humanity even to those beyond the normal intellectual ability. I highly recommend!
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1 person found this helpful
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- AGAM BRAHMA
- 05-26-23
One of the best ever
Spell-binding content
Shows how paradoxical beginnings can
How unexpected these events are, that shaped the foundation of our belief today
The epilogue wasn’t that useful, IMO
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1 person found this helpful
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- Brendan J Murphy
- 04-19-23
It’s the best in a while
Tough to describe. I’ll have to read, listen again. I stopped listening to read the book.
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