Science & Technology Audiobooks

Hampton Sides (Author), Peter Noble, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Conservative Environmentalist: Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future

A young, conservative environmentalist provides an intrepid vision for both solving our climate crisis and prioritizing the American national interest. Politicians, pseudo-experts, and other partisans have led us to believe that there are only two approaches to climate change: doomerism or denial. Benji Backer, Founder and Executive Chairman of the American Conservation Coalition, argues that both are dead ends. In The Conservative Environmentalist, he delivers an entirely new strategy to take care of the planet while putting put the economic interest of the American people first. Backer makes the compelling case that conservative principles are the key to climate solutions that actually work. In this book, you'll visit the country's most diverse ecosystems and consequential manufacturing hubs-from Utah coal mines and Texas oil fields to Louisiana wetlands and Rhode Island offshore wind farms-witnessing the power of individual entrepreneurship and local problem-solving. You'll be inspired by groundbreaking efforts to strengthen earth's ecosystems (that Green New Dealers and other Big Government advocates would prefer to keep hidden), like partnerships between oil and gas companies and environmental nonprofits to preserve thousands of acres of wetlands. Drawing on cutting-edge science, a deep understanding of local community needs, and his experience rallying politicians on both sides of the aisle to take action, Backer offers hope for everyone who cares about the state of the great outdoors. Fascinating, clear-headed, and full of surprises, The Conservative Environmentalist is the fresh, audacious approach needed to ensure a sustainable future, and particularly one that works for America.

Benji Backer (Author), Benji Backer, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Before It's Gone: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small Town America

In the vein of This Changes Everything and Saving Us, a character-driven and shocking up-close look at the way climate change is affecting America, right now, and a call to action to protect the people and places we stand to lose if nothing is done to preserve our planet. Discussion of the climate crisis has always suffered from a problem of abstraction. Data points and warnings of an overheated future struggle to break through the noise of everyday life. Deniers often portray climate solutions as inconvenient, expensive, and unnecessary. And many politicians, cloistered by status and focused always on their next election, do not yet see climate as a winning issue in the short run, so they don't take any action at all. But climate change, and its devastating consequences, has kept apace whether we want to pay attention or not. CBS News national correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti has seen that crisis unfold for himself, spending nearly two decades reporting across the United States (and the world) documenting the people, communities, landmarks, and traditions we've already surrendered. Vigliotti shares with urgency and personal touch the story of an America on the brink. Before It's Gone traces Vigliotti's travels across the country, taking him to the frontlines of climate disaster and revealing the genuine impacts of climate change that countless Americans have already been forced to confront. From massive forest fires in California to hurricanes in Louisiana, receding coastlines in Massachusetts and devastated fisheries in Alaska, we learn that warnings of a future impacted by climate are no more; the climate catastrophe is already here. This is the story of America, and Americans, on the edge, and a powerful argument that radical action on climate change with a respect for its people and traditions is not only possible, but also the only way to preserve what we love.

Jonathan Vigliotti (Author), Jonathan Vigliotti (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains and Bodies

Brought to you by Penguin. A troubling and humane account of how climate breakdown is rewriting our bodies' biology The climate crisis is wreaking havoc across the globe, raising sea levels, disrupting ancient weather patterns and decimating biodiversity worldwide. But new research shows that the warming climate is not just affecting the planet's physical systems - it is affecting us all individually too. In The Weight of Nature, the neuroscientist and journalist Clayton Page Aldern examines, for the first time, the seismic consequences of climate change on the human mind, brain and body. The now-familiar concept of climate anxiety, he shows us, is just the tip of the iceberg: a revolution is taking place in the deepest recesses of our neurochemistry. The rapidly changing environment is directly intervening in our brain health, behaviour, cognition and decision-making in real time, affecting everything from aggravated assault and online hate speech to productivity and the global dementia epidemic. Travelling the world to meet the scientists, economists and psychologists unravelling the tangled connections between us and our environment, and reporting the stories of those who are already feeling these shifts most keenly, Aldern explores how a weary world is wearing on us. It soon becomes apparent that, as climate change forces the seas and ice and heat index to their extremes, the extremities reach back. Lucid, challenging and at times deeply moving, The Weight of Nature is a revelation, bringing to light the myriad ways in which the natural world tugs and prods at the decisions you make; how it twists and folds your memories and mental states; how this nebulous everywhere we call the environment is changing our very humanity from the inside out. ©2024 Clayton Aldern (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Clayton Aldern (Author), Clayton Aldern, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Alien Earths: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos

Brought to you by Penguin. For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether we're alone in the cosmos. Now, for the first time, we have the technology to investigate. The question should have an obvious answer: yes or no. But once you try to find life elsewhere, you realize it is not so simple. How do you find it over cosmic distances? What actually is life? As founding director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute, astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger built a team of tenacious scientists from many disciplines to create a uniquely specialized toolkit to find life on faraway worlds. In Alien Earths, she demonstrates how we can use our homeworld as a Rosetta Stone, creatively analyzing Earth's history and its astonishing biosphere to inform this search. With infectious enthusiasm, she takes us on an eye-opening journey to the most unusual exoplanets that have shaken our worldview - planets covered in oceans of lava, lonely wanderers lost in space, and others with more than one sun in their sky! And the best contenders for Alien Earths. We also see the imagined worlds of science fiction and how close they come to reality. We live in an incredible new epoch of exploration. As our witty and knowledgeable tour guide, Professor Kaltenegger shows how we discover not merely new continents, like the explorers of old, but whole new worlds circling other stars and how we could spot life there. Worlds from where aliens may even be gazing back at us. What if we're not alone? ©2024 Lisa Kaltenegger (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Lisa Kaltenegger (Author), Cassandra Campbell, Lisa Kaltenegger, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Life as We Know It Can Be: My Search for a World Worth Passing Down

Award-winning journalist and CNN chief climate correspondent Bill Weir takes readers through time and around our changing world to confront the biggest threats to life as we know it and search for proven ways to build happier, healthier, and more resilient communities, come what may. While reporting from every state and continent, and filming his acclaimed CNN Original Series, The Wonder List, Bill Weir has spent decades telling the stories of unique people, places, cultures, and creatures on the brink of change. And as the first Chief Climate Correspondent in network news, he is immersed in the latest scientific warnings and breakthroughs while often on the frontlines of disasters, natural and manmade. After the birth of his son in April 2020, Bill began distilling these experiences into a series of Earth Day letters for his boy to read in 2050, weaving the worry and wonder into a reminder to other anxious parents that they are not alone and a better future can still be written. This dialog with a boy born into “The Age of Unreason” inspired Life As We Know It (Can Be). With a storyteller’s flair, Bill digs into fascinating corners of history, psychology, technology, and his own biographyto connect the lessons he’s collected from the happiest, healthiest, and most resilient societies. Bill’s stories take readers on journeys from the Greek Island where people live to 100 at an astonishing rate to the one community in Florida that took on a hurricane and never lost power, from the Antarctic Peninsula where one species of penguin is showing us the key to survival to the nuclear fusion labs where scientists are trying to build a star in box. In these pages, we join a search for ancient wisdom and new ideas. Life As We Know It (Can Be) is a celebration of the wonders of our planet, a meditation on the human wants and needs that drive it out of balance, and an inspiration for communities to galvanize around nature and each other as the very best way to brace for what’s next.

Bill Weir (Author), Bill Weir, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

We Loved It All: A Memory of Life

Acclaimed novelist Lydia Millet’s first work of nonfiction is a genre-defying tour de force that makes an impassioned argument for people to see their emotional and spiritual lives as infinitely dependent on the lives of nonhuman beings. Drawing on a quarter-century of experience as an advocate for endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity, Millet offers intimate portraits of what she calls “the others”—the extraordinary animals with whom we still share the world, along with those already lost. Humans, too, fill this book, as Millet touches on the lives of her world-traveling parents, fascinating partners and friends, and colorful relatives, from diplomats to nut farmers—all figures in the complex tapestry each of us weaves with the surrounding world. Written in the tradition of Annie Dillard or Robert Macfarlane, We Loved It All is an incantatory work that will appeal to anyone concerned about the future of life on earth—including our own.

Lydia Millet (Author), Xe Sands (Narrator)

Audiobook

Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa

Brought to you by Penguin. At the heart of the extraordinary ferment of the High Renaissance stood a distinctive, strange and beguiling figure: the magus. An unstable mix of scientist, bibliophile, engineer, fabulist and fraud, the magus ushered in modern physics and chemistry while also working on everything from secret codes to siege engines to magic tricks. Anthony Grafton's wonderfully original book discusses the careers of men who somehow managed to be both figures of startling genius and - by some measures - credulous or worse. The historical Faust, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa are all fascinating characters, closely linked to monarchs, artists and soldiers and sitting at the heart of any definition of why the Renaissance was a time of such restless innovation. The study of the stars, architecture, warfare, even medicine: all of these and more were revolutionized in some way by the experiments and tricks of these extraordinary individuals. No book does a better job of allowing us to understand the ways that magic, religion and science were once so intertwined and often so hard to tell apart. ©2024 Anthony Grafton (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Anthony Grafton (Author), Nick Pearse, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Countryfile: A Year in the Countryside

Tbd (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Life of Birds

A fully updated new edition of David Attenborough’s bestselling classic. BIRDS. Over 9,000 species, the most widespread of all animals: on icebergs, in the Sahara or under the sea, at home in our gardens or flying for over a year at a time. Earthbound, we can only look and listen, enjoying their lightness, freedom and richness of plumage and song. David Attenborough has been watching and learning all his life. His classic book, now fully updated with the latest discoveries in ornithology, is a brilliant introduction to bird behaviours around the world: what they do and why they do it. He looks at each step in birds' lives and the problems they have to solve: learning to fly; finding food; communicating; mating and caring for nests, eggs and young; migrating; facing dangers and surviving harsh conditions. Sir David has no equal in helping others to learn and making it exciting. His curiosity and enjoyment are infectious. He shows the lifelong pleasure that birds around us offer, and how much we miss if unaware of them.

David Attenborough (Author), David Attenborough, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Heart: An Owner's Guide

Become body literate with Heart: An Owner's Guide, the next book in The Body Literacy Library, an enlightening series that will democratise health for a new generation of readers. Heart: An Owner's Guide is an informative, practical, and engaging introduction to all aspects of heart health with the goal of living well and longer. Find out what is the key to a long, healthy life, and what is your own personal cardiac risk. Author Dr Paddy Barrett is an engaging and media-friendly Consultant Cardiologist who specialises in preventative health care. He translates medical jargon into simple, clear prose, answering frequently asked patient queries, such as Should I take aspirin? Are heart attacks hereditary? Is red wine healthy? Why do I have erectile dysfunction? and much more. From what you should eat (or not) and exercising smarter to why stress is as dangerous as smoking, this hard-working book applies science to the everyday, with FAQs and myth busters, all supported by the latest medical research. Heart: An Owner's Guide won't just help you to better understand your body, it might even save your life. © 2024 Paddy Barrett © 2024 DK Audio

Paddy Barrett (Author), Conor Sheridan, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Gut: An Owner's Guide

Become body literate with Gut: An Owner's Guide, the next book in The Body Literacy Library, an enlightening series that will democratise health for a new generation of readers. Gut: An Owner's Guide is an informative, practical, and engaging introduction to this hidden-away part of the body. We tend to only pay attention to our gut when it tries to tell us something - when it feels uncomfortable or something goes wrong. This myth-busting audiobook focuses on all aspects of gut health, so you can steer clear of Dr Google and find out what will really make your gut happier and healthier. From what you should eat (or not) to how often you should poo, to the microbiome and the brain/gut connection - this taboo-tackling audiobook applies science to the everyday, with simple checklists, FAQs, and myth busters, all supported by the latest medical research. Gut: An Owner's Guide won't just help you to understand your body, it might even change your life. Dr Austin Chiang is a world-renowned expert in gut health and TikTok star, who believes everyone has a right to know and understand their body. He translates medical jargon into simple, clear prose, answering frequently asked patient queries, and investigating what we fear, and most misunderstand about our gut. © 2024 TAustin Chiang © 2024 DK Audio

Austin Chiang (Author), Austin Chiang (Narrator)

Audiobook