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The Year Without Summer
- 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
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Publisher's summary
1816 was a remarkable year - mostly for the fact that there was no summer. As a result of a volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia, weather patterns were disrupted worldwide for months, allowing for excessive rain, frost, and snowfall through much of the Northeastern US and Europe in the summer of 1816.
In the US, the extraordinary weather produced food shortages, religious revivals, and extensive migration from New England to the Midwest. In Europe, the cold and wet summer led to famine, food riots, the transformation of stable communities into wandering beggars, and one of the worst typhus epidemics in history. 1816 was the year Frankenstein was written. It was also the year Turner painted his fiery sunsets. All of these things are linked to global climate change - something we are quite aware of now, but that was utterly mysterious to people in the 19th century, who concocted all sorts of reasons for such an ungenial season.
Making use of a wealth of source material and employing a compelling narrative approach featuring peasants and royalty, politicians, writers, and scientists, The Year Without Summer by William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman examines not only the climate change engendered by the volcano, but also its effects on politics, the economy, the arts, and social structures.
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- Unabridged
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After a lifetime of research and debate on Australian and international history, Geoffrey Blainey is well-placed to introduce us to the people who have played a part and to guide us through the events which have created the Australian identity: the mania for spectator sport, the suspicion of the tall poppy, the rivalries of Catholic and Protestant, Sydney and Melbourne, new and old homelands, the conflicts of war abroad and race at home, the importance of technology, the recognition of our Aboriginal past and Native Title.
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Just couldn't stand the paternalism
- By Matthew on 04-02-14
By: Geoffrey Blainey
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Rain
- A Natural and Cultural History
- By: Cynthia Barnett
- Narrated by: Christina Traister
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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It is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of all the world's water. Yet this is the first audiobook to tell the story of rain.
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Mostly a cultural history
- By serine on 02-10-16
By: Cynthia Barnett
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Ghosts of Gold Mountain
- The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad
- By: Gordon H. Chang
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in America. Converging on the enormous western worksite of the Transcontinental Railroad, the migrants spent years dynamiting tunnels through the snow-packed cliffs of the Sierra Nevada and laying tracks across the burning Utah desert. Their sweat and blood fueled the ascent of an interlinked, industrial United States. But those of them who survived this perilous effort would be pushed to the margins of American life and then to the fringes of public memory.
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Very inspiring, educational, and enlightening!
- By Amazon Customer on 06-25-19
By: Gordon H. Chang
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Collapse
- How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- By: Jared Diamond
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 27 hrs and 1 min
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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
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Coffeeland
- One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug
- By: Augustine Sedgewick
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Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world - one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism, the leading source of the world's most popular drug, and perhaps the most widespread word on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick's Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's 500-year transformation from a mysterious Muslim ritual into an everyday necessity.
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Unfortunately
- By Brian on 06-06-20
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Panama Fever
- By: Matthew Parker
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The building of the Panama Canal was one of the greatest engineering feats in human history. A tale of exploration, conquest, money, politics, and medicine, Panama Fever charts the challenges that marked the long, labyrinthine road to the building of the canal. Drawing on a wealth of new materials and sources, Matthew Parker brings to life the men who recognized the impact a canal would have on global politics and economics.
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Good book, marginal narrator
- By CmH - HB, CA on 06-02-08
By: Matthew Parker
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Artificial Intelligence
- Modern Magic or Dangerous Future?
- By: Yorick Wilks
- Narrated by: Hannibal Hills
- Length: 5 hrs
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AI expert Yorick Wilks takes a journey through the history of artificial intelligence up to the present day, examining its origins, controversies, and achievements, as well as looking into just how it works. He also considers the future, assessing whether these technologies could menace our way of life and how we are all likely to benefit from AI applications in the years to come.
By: Yorick Wilks
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Water in Plain Sight
- Hope for a Thirsty World
- By: Judith D. Schwartz
- Narrated by: Tia Rider
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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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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18 Miles
- The Epic Drama of Our Atmosphere and Its Weather
- By: Christopher Dewdney
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
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We live at the bottom of an ocean of air - 5,200 million million tons, to be exact. It sounds like a lot, but Earth’s atmosphere is smeared onto its surface in an alarmingly thin layer - 99 percent contained within 18 miles. Yet, within this fragile margin lies a magnificent realm - at once gorgeous, terrifying, capricious, and elusive. With his keen eye for identifying and uniting seemingly unrelated events, Chris Dewdney reveals to us the invisible rivers in the sky that affect how our weather works and the structure of clouds and storms and seasons, the rollercoaster of climate.
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10% science, 90% other stuff
- By Daniel W. Fox, Jr. on 10-09-20
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The Company
- The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Empire
- By: Stephen R. Bown
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 16 hrs and 5 mins
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The Hudson’s Bay Company started out small in 1670, trading practical manufactured goods for furs with the indigenous inhabitants of inland subarctic Canada. Controlled by a handful of English aristocrats, it expanded into a powerful political force that ruled the lives of many thousands of people - from the lowlands south and west of Hudson Bay, to the tundra, the great plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific Northwest.
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Deserves higher rating.
- By Pat Newell on 05-22-21
By: Stephen R. Bown
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The 1883 Eruption of Krakatoa
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Perhaps the most famous and most destructive eruption in modern history was the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. Even without the instantaneous forms of communication that are now available, the world watched in wonder for new updates about a tiny South Pacific island. And though few of them would ever go there, Krakatoa remained a source of fascination for the much of the world for the next 50 years.
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Total Waste
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What listeners say about The Year Without Summer
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lin Waters
- 09-26-23
Mind blown!
I absolutely love this book! I have listened to it in entirety several time! Absolutely fascinating how an event on one side of the world could effect some many places
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- Kent Barnett
- 01-19-24
Good history lesson.
How people create hysteria and how easy it is to fall back into that mindset.
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- Grendel
- 09-12-23
A 21st Century view of a Mysterious Event
The level of detail and scope of this book was amazing, the author(s) poured over documents that spanned all the major countries of the world and delved deep into them to provide an extremely accurate view into the effects of something we squabble over today. The Climate and it's changes.
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- Ellen NB
- 02-24-20
Good audiobook to fall asleep to
I was expecting a gripping story of the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history, a sympathetic focus on Indonesians and colonizers and Tambora's impact on them, and accounts of the Year Without a Summer and its impact around the world.
While this book does touch on these, and it does discuss some migrations triggered by crop failures, the reader drowns in facts, figures, and exhaustive and repetitive accounts of unseasonal weather week by week, sometimes day by day, including local temperatures, precipitation, flood levels, how many days it rained, how many days it snowed, etc, etc. Other chapters embark on long recitals of crop failures, right down to individual regions' and towns' losses of oats, wheat, corn, potatoes. As harvests fail, recitals change to local bread prices and food riots. The audiobook format and sonorous narration don't do the book any favors, but these repetitive passages tend to obscure any sense of an overarching narrative or point.
The book does enliven its meteorological survey with biographical accounts of key historical figures and a few colorful characters connected with the stormy weather of 1816: Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Napoleon (why?), Robert Peel, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and ambassasor John Quincy Adams in London.
That's the book's strength: it is an exhaustive compendium of firsthand accounts and data for the Year of No Summer in England and New England. It's just the most boring account of an volcanic eruption I've ever encountered.
The book's biggest weakness, as it inadvertently admits in the final chapter's whirlwind summary of Tambora's impact on India, China, and a few other areas outside Europe, is that non-English sources were "inaccessible" [to the authors].
I feel like a book published in 2019 on Tambora should be global in scope, not limit its focus almost exclusively to Britain, northwestern Europe, and the eastern seaboard of the US.
Happily, there IS a book that explores the drama of the Tambora eruption and its impacts all over the worls. Namely, Gillan D'arcy Wood's 2014 book on Tambora. The problem with that book is that it enthusiastically pounces on various world trends impossible fallout from the timbre eruption where it's difficult to prove cause and effect. In other words, that book is more speculative and interpretive, whereas this one focuses on collecting data and primary sources.
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- Dominic
- 08-20-20
Very informative as presented
A very comprehensive presentation of life at the time as they all were experiencing a very unusual time with the effects from a volcanic eruption in the South Pacific
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- Faycal Ikhouane
- 11-24-22
Intersting story
In April 1815 mount Tambora in Indoneasia erupted (intensity 7 in a scale of 8). The book relates the events that were a consequence of the eruption, in particular the intense cold that many parts of the globe experienced. The summer of 1816 was more like a cold winter which led to the loss of harvests and famine. The book describes with great details what happened in the US, in some details the effects of the eruption in Europe, and gives a brief overview of what happened in Asia because of a lack of data.
The authors follows also the relationship between some known authors and the year without summer, in particular Mary Shelly and her novel Frenkenstein.
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- Christi
- 12-29-20
I wouldn't recommend
The information on the subject matter contained in this book could have been done in a documentary. The author went off on many tangents and failed to tie them to the topic at hand.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kindle Customer
- 09-28-23
long, rambling, often totally unrelated
This will put you to sleep! it felt like everyone that ever lived during that time was discussed in great detail! And he admitted that there is still doubt if the eruption of Mount Tambora was the cause. So this is a total waste of time to read! I am glad that I made it through to the end.
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- Randy Carbo
- 10-06-23
Far too long for so little (unique) material
It’s almost is if the manuscript was never edited. He quotes countless newspapers saying exactly the same thing for almost 100 pages.
Allow me to summarize the whole book in a paragraph. Volcano erupts in Indonesia and it was very loud. There was unusual snow in June and spectacular sunsets. The summer was cool and dry in the Americas, while wet in Europe. Crops were very poor and grain prices increased. Thomas Jefferson had a fascination with meteorology and liked making weather measurements. Lord Byron and Mary Shelley spent the summer in Switzerland. People were hungry and poor in 1817 and there was much unrest. The end.
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- Tom Van
- 12-30-23
Data, data, data
This book is a collection of data read aloud. No story; no analysis; just a comprehensive anecdotal quoting of sources and a bit of international history.
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