Audiobooks by Jared Diamond

[Spanish] - Sociedades comparadas: Un pequeño libro sobre grandes temas

"El multipremiado profesor Diamond divulga los resultados de su apasionante estudio. ¿Qué se puede aprender sobre las grandes cuestiones de las ciencias sociales a través de la observación? Jared Diamond comenzó su carrera académica como naturalista: observaba a los pájaros y deducía reglas de su comportamiento. Cuando cambió de foco y empezó a estudiar organismos complejos como las sociedades humanas, no cambió de método, y en este breve libro explica cuánto se puede aprender a través de este procedimiento. En siete breves capítulos explica por qué unos países son pobres y otros ricos, cómo influyen las instituciones en la prosperidad, la influencia de la geografía en el devenir de China frente al de Europa, el papel de las crisis nacionales, y los grandes problemas que el mundo afronta hoy en día. Un audiolibro fascinante que compone una lección magistral sobre las grandes cuestiones de la actualidad y qué lecciones podemos sacar de las ciencias sociales para afrontarlas."

Jared Diamond (Author), John Alex Toro (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money

"In light of the colossal losses and amidst the resulting confusion that still permeates, it is time to rethink money management in the broadest of terms. Drastic changes need to be made and examining managers who actually made money during 2008 is a logical starting place. It is striking that most of the money managers that prospered through the crisis were those that understood the broader macro environment and readjusted and realigned to a different environment, no longer relying on old and outdated models. The Invisible Hands provides investors and traders with the latest thinking from the best and the most successful key players in money management, highlighting the specific risk and return objectives of each, and then discusses the evolution of certain styles and beliefs in money management. These top macro thinkers reveal their own approaches to markets, risk, and the broader complex world in which we live, as well as their advice as to how investors should be approaching money management."

Jared Diamond, Nouriel Roubini, Steven Drobny (Author), Basil Sands (Narrator)

Audiobook

[Spanish] - Armas, gérmenes y acero: Breve historia de la humanidad en los últimos trece mil años

"Armas, gérmenes y acero, Premio Pulitzer 1998, cuestiona la prepotente visión occidental del progreso humano y nos ayuda a comprender cómo el mundo moderno y sus desigualdades han llegado a ser como son. Hace 13.000 años la evolución de las distintas sociedades humanas comenzó a tomar rumbos diferentes. La temprana domesticación de animales y el cultivo de plantas silvestres en el Creciente Fértil, China, Mesoamérica y otras zonas geográficas otorgó una ventaja inicial a sus habitantes. Sin embargo, los orígenes localizados de la agricultura y la ganadería son solo una parte de la explicación de los diferentes destinos de los pueblos. Las sociedades que superaron esta fase de cazadores-recolectores se encontraron con más probabilidades de desarrollo, supervivencia y poder bélico. Reseña: «Uno de los estudios históricos más originales y sugerentes de los últimos años.» Juan Avilés, El Mundo"

Jared Diamond (Author), John Alex Toro (Narrator)

Audiobook

Swing Kings: The Inside Story of Baseball's Home Run Revolution

"''This is the best baseball book I’ve read in years. Swing Kings is a love letter to small people with big ideas.'' — Sam Walker, author of The Captain Class From the Wall Street Journal’s national baseball writer, the captivating story of the home run boom, following a group of players who rose from obscurity to stardom and the rogue swing coaches who helped them usher the game into a new age. We are in a historic era for the home run. The 2019 season saw the most homers ever, obliterating a record set just two years before. It is a shift that has transformed the way the game is played, contributing to more strikeouts, longer games, and what feels like the logical conclusion of the analytics era. In Swing Kings, Wall Street Journal national baseball writer Jared Diamond reveals that the secret behind this unprecedented shift isn’t steroids or the stitching of the baseballs, it’s the most elemental explanation of all: the swing. In this lively narrative romp, he tracks a group of baseball’s biggest stars—including Aaron Judge, J.D. Martinez, and Justin Turner—who remade their swings under the tutelage of a band of renegade coaches, and remade the game in the process. These coaches, many of them baseball washouts who have reinvented themselves as swing gurus, for years were one of the game’s best-kept secrets. Among their ranks are a swimming pool contractor, the owner of a billiards hall, and an ex-hippie whose swing insights draw from surfing and the technique of Japanese samurai. Now, as Diamond artfully charts, this motley cast has moved from the baseball margins to its center of power. They are changing the way hitting is taught to players of all ages, and major league clubs are scrambling for their services, hiring them in record numbers as coaches and consultants. And Diamond himself, whose baseball career ended in high school, enlists the tutelage of each swing coach he profiles, with an aim toward starring in the annual Boston-New York media game at Yankee Stadium. Swing Kings is both a rollicking history of baseball’s recent past and a deeply reported, character-driven account of a battle between opponents as old as time: old and new, change and stasis, the establishment and those who break from it. Jared Diamond has written a masterful chronicle of America’s pastime at the crossroads."

Jared Diamond (Author), Joe Farinacci (Narrator)

Audiobook

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

"A brilliant new theory of how and why some nations recover from trauma and others don't, by the author of the landmark bestsellers Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. In his earlier bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in the final book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crisis through selective change -- a coping mechanism more commonly associated with personal trauma. In a dazzling comparative study, Diamond shows us how seven countries have survived defining upheavals in the recent past -- from US Commodore Perry's arrival in Japan to the Soviet invasion of Finland to Pinochet's regime in Chile -- through a process of painful self-appraisal and adaptation, and he identifies patterns in the way that these distinct nations recovered from calamity. Looking ahead to the future, he investigates whether the United States, and the world, are squandering their natural advantages, on a path towards political conflict and decline. Or can we still learn from the lessons of the past? Adding a psychological dimension to the awe-inspiring grasp of history, geography, economics, and anthropology that marks all Diamond's work, Upheaval reveals how both nations and individuals can become more resilient. The result is a book that is epic, urgent, and groundbreaking."

Jared Diamond (Author), Henry Strozier (Narrator)

Audiobook

Why is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality

"To us humans the sex lives of many animals seem weird. In fact, by comparison with all the other animals, we are the ones with the weird sex lives. How did that come to be?Just count our bizarre ways. We are the only social species to insist on carrying out sex privately. Stranger yet, we have sex at any time, even when the female can't be fertilized (for example, because she is already pregnant, post-menopausal, or between fertile cycles). A human female doesn't know her precise time of fertility and certainly doesn't advertise it to human males by the striking color changes, smells, and sounds used by other female mammals.Why do we differ so radically in these and other important aspects of our sexuality from our closest ancestor, the apes? Why does the human female, virtually alone among mammals go through menopause? Why does the human male stand out as one of the few mammals to stay (often or usually) with the female he impregnates, to help raise the children that he sired? Why is the human penis so unnecessarily large?There is no one better qualified than Jared Diamond-renowned expert in the fields of physiology and evolutionary biology and award-winning author-to explain the evolutionary forces that operated on our ancestors to make us sexually different. With wit and a wealth of fascinating examples, he explains how our sexuality has been as crucial as our large brains and upright posture in our rise to human status."

Jared Diamond (Author), L.J. Ganser (Narrator)

Audiobook

Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution Of Human Sexuality

"Why are humans one of the few species to have sex in private? Why do humans have sex any day of the month or year, including when the female is pregnant, beyond her reproductive years, or between her fertile cycles? Why are human females one of the few mammals to go through menopause? Human sexuality seems normal to us but it is bizarre by the standards of other animals. Jared Diamond argues that our strange sex lives were as crucial to our rise to human status as were our large brains. He also describes the battle of the sexes in the human and animal world over parental care, and why sex differences in the genetic value of parental care provide a biological basis for the all-too-familiar different attitudes of men and women towards extramarital sex. (p) 1997 Orion Publishing Group"

Jared Diamond (Author), Emilia Fox (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal

"The Development of an Extraordinary Species We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet -- having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art -- while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of survival. What is it about that two percent difference in DNA that has created such a divergence between evolutionary cousins? In this fascinating, provocative, passionate, funny, endlessly entertaining work, renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning author and scientist Jared Diamond explores how the extraordinary human animal, in a remarkably short time, developed the capacity to rule the world . . . and the means to irrevocably destroy it."

Jared Diamond (Author), Rob Shapiro (Narrator)

Audiobook

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history. Having done field work in New Guinea for more than 30 years, Jared Diamond presents the geographical and ecological factors that have shaped the modern world. From the viewpoint of an evolutionary biologist, he highlights the broadest movements both literal and conceptual on every continent since the Ice Age, and examines societal advances such as writing, religion, government, and technology. Diamond also dissects racial theories of global history, and the resulting work-Guns, Germs and Steel-is a major contribution to our understanding the evolution of human societies."

Jared Diamond (Author), Doug Ordunio (Narrator)

Audiobook