-
The Book
- A Cover-To-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
- Narrated by: Dennis Kleinman
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
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Publisher's summary
We may love books, but do we know what lies behind them? In The Book, Keith Houston reveals that the paper, ink, thread, glue, and board from which a book is made tell as rich a story as the words on its pages - of civilizations, empires, human ingenuity, and madness. In an invitingly tactile history of this 2,000-year-old medium, Houston follows the development of writing, printing, the art of illustrations, and binding to show how we have moved from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls to the hardcovers and paperbacks of today. The Book gives us the momentous and surprising history behind humanity's most important-and universal-information technology.
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“Erudite, playful, and illuminating . . . Houston is both witty and intensely detailed . . . A splendid, challenging mixture of information and fun.” (Kirkus Reviews)
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Story
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books tells the story of the first and greatest visionary of the print age, a man who saw how the explosive expansion of knowledge and information generated by the advent of the printing press would entirely change the landscape of thought and society. He also happened to be Christopher Columbus’ illegitimate son.
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Erudite. Stimulating. Rewarding.
- By R. P. RIBEYRE on 10-26-20
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Knowing What We Know
- The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classes—this is Simon Winchester’s brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans acquire, retain, and pass on information and data, and how technology continues to change our lives and our minds. Throughout this fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder what rational humans are becoming. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of thought? What is information without wisdom?
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Colorful anecdotes but tiring after a while.
- By reader on 05-03-23
By: Simon Winchester
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The Writing of the Gods
- The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone
- By: Edward Dolnick
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous objects in the world, attracting millions of visitors to the British museum every year, and yet most people don’t really know what it is. Discovered in a pile of rubble in 1799, this slab of stone proved to be the key to unlocking a lost language that baffled scholars for centuries.
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Hieroglyphs For The People
- By Spike on 01-15-22
By: Edward Dolnick
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The Light Ages
- The Surprising Story of Medieval Science
- By: Seb Falk
- Narrated by: Seb Falk
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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An illuminating guide to the scientific and technological achievements of the Middle Ages through the life of a crusading astronomer-monk.
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Fascinating exploration of medieval science
- By Celia on 07-05-21
By: Seb Falk
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Printer's Error
- Irreverent Stories from Book History
- By: Rebecca Romney, J. P. Romney
- Narrated by: J.P. Romney
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the Gutenberg Bible first went on sale in 1455, printing has been viewed as one of the highest achievements of human innovation. But the march of progress hasn't been smooth; downright bizarre is more like it. Printer's Error chronicles some of the strangest and most humorous episodes in the history of Western printing. Take, for example, the Gutenberg Bible. While the book is regarded as the first printed work in the Western world, Gutenberg's name doesn't appear anywhere on it.
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Porn for Ye Old Bibliophiles
- By George M. Liveakos on 03-24-17
By: Rebecca Romney, and others
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Da Vinci's Ghost
- Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image
- By: Toby Lester
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Toby Lester, author of the award-winning The Fourth Part of the World, masterfully crafts yet another century-spanning saga of people and ideas in this epic story of Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic drawing of a man inscribed in a circle and a square. Over time, the nearly 550-year-old ink-on-paper sketch has transformed into a collective symbol of the nature of genius, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human spirit.
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Haunting Expierience
- By Paul on 02-10-12
By: Toby Lester
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The Map of Knowledge
- A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found
- By: Violet Moller
- Narrated by: Susan Duerden
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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The foundations of modern knowledge - philosophy, math, astronomy, geography - were laid by the Greeks, whose ideas were written on scrolls and stored in libraries across the Mediterranean and beyond. But as the vast Roman Empire disintegrated, so did appreciation of these precious texts. Christianity cast a shadow over so-called pagan thought, books were burned, and the library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of classical knowledge, was destroyed. Yet some texts did survive and The Map of Knowledge explores the role played by seven cities around the Mediterranean....
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Terrible narration.
- By nathan535 on 11-05-19
By: Violet Moller
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The Ark Before Noah
- Decoding the Story of the Flood
- By: Irving Finkel
- Narrated by: Irving Finkel, Gareth Armstrong
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the Victorian period, it has been understood that the story of Noah, iconic in the Book of Genesis, and a central motif in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, derives from a much older story that existed centuries before in ancient Babylon. But the relationship between the Babylonian and biblical traditions was shrouded in mystery. Then, in 2009, Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum and a world authority on ancient Mesopotamia, found himself playing detective.
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excellent, enlightening, entertaining
- By D. Littman on 07-17-14
By: Irving Finkel
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The Golden Thread
- How Fabric Changed History
- By: Kassia St. Clair
- Narrated by: Helen Johns
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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From colorful 30,000-year-old threads found on the floor of a Georgian cave to the Indian calicoes that sparked the Industrial Revolution, The Golden Thread weaves an illuminating story of human ingenuity. Design journalist Kassia St. Clair guides us through the technological advancements and cultural customs that would redefine human civilization - from the fabric that allowed mankind to achieve extraordinary things (traverse the oceans and shatter athletic records) and survive in unlikely places (outer space and the South Pole).
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Excellent for those interested in textiles
- By Adeliese Baumann on 12-14-19
By: Kassia St. Clair
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Women's Work
- The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
- By: Elizabeth Wayland Barber
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty thousand years ago, women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers. In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women. Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture.
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Respectful treatment of the archeological record.
- By fiberflair on 02-23-21
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Twelve Caesars
- Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern (Bollingen Series)
- By: Mary Beard
- Narrated by: Mary Beard
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book - against a background of today’s “sculpture wars” - Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the Western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the “Twelve Caesars”, from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian.
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This foray into art history is a disappointment.
- By Stephen J Chiulli on 11-10-21
By: Mary Beard
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Shakespeare's Library
- Unlocking the Greatest Mystery in Literature
- By: Stuart Kells
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Millions of words of scholarship have been expended on the world's most famous author and his work. And yet a critical part of the puzzle, Shakespeare's library, is a mystery. For four centuries people have searched for it: in mansions, palaces, and libraries; in riverbeds, sheep pens, and partridge coops; and in the corridors of the mind. Yet no trace of the Bard's manuscripts, books, or letters has ever been found.
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Dismissed Mary Sidney Herbert without explanation
- By Lisa on 07-30-19
By: Stuart Kells