Audiobooks by Nate Pedersen

Pseudoscience: An Amusing History of Crackpot Ideas and Why We Love Them

A rollicking visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science. The Bermuda Triangle. Personality tests. Ghost hunting. Crop circles. Mayan Doomsday. What do all these have in common? None can quite live up the rigor of actual facts or science and yet they all attract passionate supporters anyway.   Divided into broad sections covering the easily disproved to the wildly speculative to wishful thinking and of course hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science-it's a light-hearted look into why we insist on believing in things such as Big Foot, astrology, and the existence of aliens. Did you know, for example, that you can tell a person's future by touching their butt? Rumpology. It's a thing, but not really. Or that Stanley Kubrick made a fake moon landing film for the US government? Except he didn't. Or that spontaneous human combustion is real? It ain't, but it can be explained scientifically.   From the authors of Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, Pseudoscience is a wild mix of history, pop culture, and good old fashioned science--one that not just entertains, but sheds a little light on why we all love to believe in a few things we know aren't true. 

Lydia Kang, Nate Pedersen (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World's Worst Diseases

A very timely history of disease outbreaks, from the authors of Quackery: stories of outbreaks (and their patient zeros), plus chapters on the science, culture, and cures for different types of epidemics and pandemics. Popular reading on a timely topic.

Lydia Kang, Nate Pedersen (Author), Hillary Huber (Narrator)

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Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything

What won't we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Well, just imagine a time when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants. When liquefied gold was touted as immortality in a glass. And when strychnine-yes, that strychnine, the one used in rat poison-was dosed like Viagra. Looking back with fascination, horror, and not a little dash of dark, knowing humor, Quackery recounts the lively, at times unbelievable, history of medical misfires and malpractices. Ranging from the merely weird to the outright dangerous, here are dozens of outlandish, morbidly hilarious "treatments"-conceived by doctors and scientists, by spiritualists and snake oil salesmen (yes, they literally tried to sell snake oil)-that were predicated on a range of cluelessness, trial and error, and straight-up scams. This book seamlessly combines macabre humor with science and storytelling to reveal an important and disturbing side of the ever-evolving field of medicine.

Lydia Kang, Nate Pedersen (Author), Hillary Huber (Narrator)

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