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The Sensational Past
- How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses
- Narrated by: Liz Thompson
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
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Publisher's summary
Sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch - as they were celebrated during the Enlightenment and as they are perceived today.
Blindfolding children from birth? Playing a piano made of live cats? Using tobacco to cure drowning? Wearing "flea"-colored clothes? These actions may seem odd to us, but in the 18th century, they made perfect sense.
As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent on the body alone. Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows that, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way we think about the senses and put them to use has been rather different over the ages. Journeying through the past 300 years, Purnell explores how people used their senses in ways that might shock us now. And perhaps more surprisingly, she shows how many of our own ways of life are a legacy of this earlier time.
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Sweetness and Power
- The Place of Sugar in Modern History
- By: Sidney W. Mintz
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this eye-opening study, Sidney W. Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusses the production and consumption of sugar and reveals how closely interwoven sugar's origins are as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies, with its use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat.
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Dated but still worthwhile
- By Acteon on 11-14-19
By: Sidney W. Mintz
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William Blake vs the World
- By: John Higgs
- Narrated by: John Higgs
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake.
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Best book ever
- By idamae on 11-04-22
By: John Higgs
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The Pun Also Rises
- How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics
- By: John Pollack
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The Pun Also Rises is an authoritative yet playful exploration of a practice that is common, in one form or another, to virtually every language on earth. At once entertaining and educational, this engaging book answers fundamental questions: Just what is a pun, and why do people make them? How did punning impact the development of human language, and how did that drive creativity and progress? And why, after centuries of decline, does the pun still matter?
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Punderful Little Book
- By B. Lane on 01-10-13
By: John Pollack
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Tobacco
- A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization
- By: Iain Gately
- Narrated by: Christopher Grove
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Tobacco was first cultivated and enjoyed by the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, who used it for medicinal, religious, and social purposes long before the arrival of Columbus. But when Europeans began to colonize the American continents, it became something else entirely - a cultural touchstone of pleasure and success and a coveted commodity that would transform the world economy forever.
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Interesting until a pro-smoking ending
- By Kelli on 12-25-20
By: Iain Gately
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Descartes' Bones
- A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason
- By: Russell Shorto
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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On a brutal winter's day in 1650 in Stockholm, Frenchman Rene Descartes, the most influential and controversial thinker of his time, was buried after a cold and lonely deathfar from home. Sixteen years later, the pious French Ambassador Hugues de Terlon secretly unearthed Descartes' bones and transported them to France. Why would this devoutly Catholic official care so much about the remains of a philosopher who washounded from country after country on charges of atheism?
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Philosophy of Modernity
- By Roger on 06-17-09
By: Russell Shorto
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Riveted
- The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe
- By: Jim Davies
- Narrated by: Matthew Josdal
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Professor Jim Davies's fascinating and highly accessible book, Riveted, reveals the evolutionary underpinnings of why we find things compelling. Drawing on work from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, psychology, economics, computer science, and biology, Davies offers a comprehensive explanation to show that in spite of the differences between the many things that we find compelling, they have similar effects on our minds and brains.
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Fun and excellent listen!
- By Alejandro Franco on 04-13-18
By: Jim Davies
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Self Reliance
- By: Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Narrated by: Alana Munro
- Length: 1 hr and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas. It is the source of one of Emerson's most famous quotations, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." This essay is a considered a watershed moment in which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement. An American classic.
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Don't buy this
- By Leah L on 07-31-16
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Drunk
- How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
- By: Edward Slingerland
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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While plenty of entertaining books have been written about the history of alcohol and other intoxicants, none have offered a comprehensive, convincing answer to the basic question of why humans want to get high in the first place. Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically grounded explanation for our love of alcohol.
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The equivalent of Harvey Weinstein writing a book why male dominated workplaces thrive
- By I Listen on 10-10-21
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The Japanese Tea Ceremony and the Shoguns
- By: Linda Hewitt
- Narrated by: Ken Cohen
- Length: 1 hr and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The Japanese Tea Ceremony and the Shoguns is a concise historical overview of the evolution of cha-no-yu - that uniquely Japanese ritual, the tea ceremony - and how it was used in Japan by the shoguns and other political powers between the 12th and 20th centuries to validate position and consolidate power. The contributions of leading tea masters of the past are summarized. A description of a typical tea ceremony is provided, together with a discussion of the appropriate environment and utensils.
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Moderate
- By Shigure Sohma on 10-14-16
By: Linda Hewitt