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The World Without Us
- Narrated by: Adam Grupper
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
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Publisher's summary
Just days after humans disappear, floods in New York's subways would start eroding the city's foundations and the world's cities would crumble, asphalt jungles giving way to real ones. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dalai Lama, and paleontologists, who describe a prehuman world inhabited by megafauna (like giants sloths that stood taller than mammoths), Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.
Weisman reveals Earth's tremendous capacity for self-healing and shows which human devastations are indelible and what of our highest art and culture would endure longest. Ultimately reaching a radical but persuasive solution to our planet's problems - one that needn't depend on our demise - this is narrative nonfiction at its finest, taking on an irresistible concept with gravity but a highly accessible touch.
Critic reviews
Featured Article: 15 Poignant and Postapocalyptic Listens for Fans of
The Last of Us
Naughty Dog's postapocalyptic video game The Last of Us is a masterclass in storytelling. Celebrated for its complex ruminations on grief, morality, and redemption, this unique take on dystopia has maintained a steady fanbase since 2013. That following is set to grow following the debut of HBO's television adaptation—a breakout hit that sacrifices none of the emotional stakes or brilliant character work of its source material.
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A fantastic book! Timothy Egan describes his journeys in the Pacific Northwest through visits to salmon fisheries, redwood forests and the manicured English gardens of Vancouver. Here is a blend of history, anthropology and politics.
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White man bad, capitalism bad
- By Forget about it on 04-15-21
By: Timothy Egan
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The Great Warming
- Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
- By: Brian Fagan
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
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The history of the Great Warming of a half millennium ago suggests that we may yet be underestimating the power of climate change to disrupt our lives todayand our vulnerability to drought, writes Fagan, is the silent elephant in the room.
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Good book but unpracticed, disjointed narration.
- By Paul on 09-12-10
By: Brian Fagan
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Gods, Wasps and Stranglers
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- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
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They are trees of life and trees of knowledge. They are wish-fulfillers, rain forest royalty, more precious than gold. They are the fig trees, and they have affected humanity in profound but little-known ways. Gods, Wasps and Stranglers tells their amazing story. Fig trees fed our prehuman ancestors, influenced diverse cultures, and played key roles in the dawn of civilization.
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Incredible research in a wonderful story
- By Alonsa Guevara on 11-24-22
By: Mike Shanahan
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When Humans Nearly Vanished
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- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
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Some 73,000 years ago, the Mount Toba supervolcano in toda's Indonesia erupted, releasing the energy of a million tons of explosives. So much ash and debris was injected into the stratosphere that it partially blocked the sun's radiation and caused global temperatures to drop for a decade. In this book, Donald R. Prothero presents the controversial argument that the Toba catastrophe nearly wiped out the human race, leaving only about a thousand to ten thousand breeding pairs of humans worldwide.
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A very special book
- By Scott Fitzsimmons on 02-02-19
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The Gulf
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When painter Winslow Homer first sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, he was struck by its "special kind of providence." Indeed, the Gulf presented itself as America's sea - bound by geography, culture, and tradition to the national experience - and yet, there has never been a comprehensive history of the Gulf until now. And so, in this rich and original work that explores the Gulf through our human connection with the sea, environmental historian Jack E. Davis finally places this exceptional region into the American mythos in a sweeping history that extends from the Pleistocene age to the 21st century.
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Decolonize gulf history
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We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life, supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and the humble peppercorn drove the Age of Discovery, so did coffee beans help fuel the Enlightenment and cottonseed help spark the Industrial Revolution. And from the fall of Rome to the Arab Spring, the fate of nations continues to hinge on the seeds of a Middle Eastern grass known as wheat.
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Delightfully simplistic!
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By: Thor Hanson
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Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus' landing had crossed the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago; existed mainly in small nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas were, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last 30 years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong.
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Exposes Non-Academic Audience to The Debate Between Ideas of Pre-Colombian America's
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By: Charles C. Mann
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Water in Plain Sight
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- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
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Performance
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Water scarcity is on everyone's mind. Long taken for granted, water availability has entered the realm of economics, politics, and people's food and lifestyle choices. But as anxiety mounts - even as a swath of California farmland has been left fallow and extremist groups worldwide exploit the desperation of people losing livelihoods to desertification - many are finding new routes to water security with key implications for food access, economic resilience, and climate change.
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Crucial solutions
- By Shane Emanuelle on 07-25-19
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The Book of General Ignorance
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Misconceptions, misunderstandings, and flawed facts finally get the heave-ho in this humorous, downright humiliating book of reeducation based on the phenomenal British best seller. Challenging what most of us assume to be verifiable truths in areas like history, literature, science, nature, and more, The Book of General Ignorance is a witty “gotcha” compendium of how little we actually know about anything. It’ll have you scratching your head wondering why we even bother to go to school.
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Interesting.
- By A. Hawkbird on 12-07-08
By: John Mitchinson, and others
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Collapse
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In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.
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Jared Diamond Downs You in Explanation
- By Rob on 07-20-18
By: Jared Diamond
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What listeners say about The World Without Us
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- David Manzolillo
- 08-06-22
Great, but not what I expected.
Reading a book like this you expect it to get into the environmental details and how what we do has a harmful impact and how long the things we make will last well after we are gone BECAUSE of our lack of care. And that's great, I think we need to be aware of how much better we could be doing. What I didn't expect, however, is how often that would let the math and science behind the decomposition take a backseat to the environmental message. I enjoyed it, I just expected it to be a bit different.
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- Anonymous User
- 04-16-23
Must read
It’s an ernest wake-up call for everybody. It should be in every bookshelf. I appreciate that these thematic are so wide spread, and realize that how we are living and destroying, without even thinking, is for ever. Compromises any life form for ever!
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- Anne M.
- 10-30-23
The world without us.
This was a very thought-provoking and interesting account of our current situation. Hopefully humans will work together to solve some of our most pressing problems, and prolong our time on this beautiful planet.
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Overall
- Carolyn
- 07-22-07
A fascinating premise!
Looking for something to stir your imagination and haunt your thoughts? Well, this is the book for you! Well written and well-read, this book provides fertile ground for consideration, awareness and thought beyond the words. Some may find this information to be gloomy--perhaps an indictment of humanity. I found it to be a necessary wake-up call to greater conciousness--the first step to redemption. Great book!
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23 people found this helpful
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- Jude Rodrigue
- 04-07-21
Very eye-opening!
This was a very eye-opening and kind of sad to hear about what the human race is doing to our planet. when I think about people like Brendon Grimshaw in comparison to with the rest of humanity, with the amazing work of one man on a single island was able to accomplish in healing a small portion of the planet. Can we not be more like Brendan, more like the planet's antivirus rather than more like the virus that's spreading, dominating and destroying its own ecosystem until it no longer has a host to survive itself upon? Imagine what we could really do as a human race if we put more effort into giving and healing the planet rather than taking from and destroying it!
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- SAMM
- 06-02-24
Sobering and fascinating
I learned more about the world in ways I have not considered - how everything is linked and the long term effects of what was set in motion before my time
I specifically listened for insight into a book I am working on as a hobby - set into a future when humans have long gone
This is a fantastic resource for any such endeavors, be it writing, video game, comic, etc that will lend a foundation of realism
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Overall
- Thomas
- 06-22-08
...worth a listen.
Very interesting subject. The History Channel show of the same name only scratched the surface of total content of the book.
It's nice to know that the Earth will have no almost no memory of us after several thousand years.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Toast
- 01-31-13
Not as good as I'd hoped
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
About half the time listening to this book was well spent, while the other half was me wishing the author would get to something interesting.
Would you recommend The World Without Us to your friends? Why or why not?
I would recommend this book to others, but with serious caveats. Much of The World Without Us is actually the world WITH us, describing historical or present situations then projecting those states into a possible future without humans.
The book is also written in a journalistic style which I personally find incredibly irritating. Littered with lengthy lists and inane details about what interview subjects were wearing, I continually wished someone else had written the book based on Weisman's research.
While the book is occasionally quite interesting, I feel whole swaths could have been cut without missing anything.
What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?
The narrators voice was annoying from the very beginning, and though I eventually got used ot it, I never enjoyed listened and frequently felt like slipping off to sleep.
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
If heavilly edited, yes.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Sara Martin
- 11-20-17
An intensely thought-provoking listen
I found this absolutely gripping and deeply poignant--a great work of research and contemplation of immense questions. The writing is elegant and accessible, and the narration generally good though there are some pronunciation choices and mistakes I found distracting. On the whole I heartily recommend.
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- Paul
- 04-05-22
important but gloomy
i thought this would be a book about the collapse of man made artifice after humans disappear. and I did get some of that, especially in the first part of the book where we are told how New York will fare after we're gone. but for the most part, this book was anout the myriad ways us humans are (often permanently) disfiguring our planet. I couldn't listen to the book for too long stretches of time. Sometimes I felt like I was punched in the gut after reading what we did to a species or an eco system. But I realise now that the book was better and more important for me this way. I wanted ruin porn (and I got some of that) but I also received understanding of the impact we have and how we can reduce it. An important book that I would recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in nature, ecosystems and or conservation. It was well read by the main voice actor. I do suppose I miss out on the pictures in the original book. still though; great read.
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